


the fire's found a home in me

by dandelioness



Series: The Laura Hale Cinematic Universe [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Gen, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Season/Series 01, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Burn, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Transgender Characters, True Mates, pre-Chris Argent/Laura Hale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:28:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28056138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dandelioness/pseuds/dandelioness
Summary: In which Laura Hale doesnotdie and instead becomes the Beacon Hills Alpha and also the main character. What follows is essentially a retelling of how the events of season one might have gone had there been one (1) relatively competent supernatural adult around to stop Scott, Stiles, and Derek from making Incredibly Bad Choices™.
Relationships: Chris Argent/Laura Hale, Derek Hale & Laura Hale
Series: The Laura Hale Cinematic Universe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2055171
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> this was my project for NaNo 2020 and it is complete, barring some editing work, so the chapters should appear once a week.
> 
> when I say slow burn I mean like, slow. slower than molasses in january. slower than the congressional response to covid. they do not get together in this installment. I'm a monster xoxo
> 
> title from Lorde's "Yellow Flicker Beat"

San Diego, California

eleven years before our story begins

_The idea of true mates is an old one, faded mostly to rumor but not quite rare enough to be consigned to myth: most werewolves have a pack member who claims to have known a fated pair, or knows someone who knew them. Two wolves, destined to meet and love and complete each other in a way that no one else could — not one couple in a century could have that same chance. Mom always said that her grandmother told her that true mates occur more often in epic times, the days when magic is larger than life and the heroes are born. True mate pairs populate all the best stories, the ones Laura’s pack always tells around bonfires at enormous pack reunions with distant relatives. They’re always the heroes of the kind of adventures you love to hear about but also secretly hope you never have to live through yourself. Laura Hale is sixteen when she realizes she is already living in one such story._

_Laura has known that she’ll be the next alpha of her pack since she was twelve years old. It’s not overconfidence or conceit; it’s really just process of elimination. Philip’s older, sure, but he’s also too calm, too easy-going — not to mention totally unwilling to shoulder that kind of responsibility or wield that kind of power. Derek is too sweet, wide-eyed and trusting. He may still have been a little kid when Laura first thought this through, but growing up has yet to sour his gentle nature. Cora was still a baby, but everyone already knew from the beginning that girl was going to have a Temper (with a capital-T that rhymes with P that stands for Pool!). Rosalind's kids aren't technically in the lineage, though Laura's already eyeing Jack as a potential second someday. Uncle Peter’s a lot younger than Mom, so could technically be in the running, but he’d never been quite...right. His sense of humor tends toward a little too dark, a little too cruel. He takes almost nothing seriously, but when he finally does it’s almost pathological._

_Which leaves Laura._

_She’s bright, though not as clever as Philip. Kind, but not as gentle as Derek. Righteous, without Cora’s unchecked fury. She’s honed her sharp edges, but they’re nothing so deadly as Peter’s. And above all else, Laura is unfailingly practical, which Mom has always said is the most important trait in an Alpha._ Practical _might never win her any popularity contests, but it will keep her pack, her family, safe._ Practical _means that she won’t hesitate to make the hard decisions, to accept collateral damage, and to always, always,_ always _put her pack first._

_Laura’s thinking about this now, about the pride she takes in her practicality, because she needs it. She needs something to cling to, something to hold, because with every step forward she is making the hardest decision she’s ever made._

_Laura is walking down the streets of San Diego with Uncle Peter, and even though he’s talking at her, Laura has mostly been focused on building an argument for stopping at Comic Con before they go home. Technically, they’re here so Peter can sweet-talk a beta of the Garcia pack into loaning him some ancient dusty book about God only knows what, and Laura is supposed to be building inter-pack relationships, being the future Hale Alpha and all. But really, the opportunity is just too good to waste, and she’s got a pair of leather pants in her backpack that would make for a_ killer _Faith Lehane costume._

_But this all goes out the window when a scent on the breeze hits her like a punch to the gut — she actually trips over her own feet, stumbles and would fall and eat concrete if Peter didn’t catch her arm. Laura can hardly hear the sound of his sharp teasing over the thundering beat of her own heart as she frantically scans the street for the source of that scent._

_Years ago, Laura was watching_ The Princess Bride _with Derek, baby Cora curled asleep in her arms. Mom was wandering in and out of the room while she puttered around the house, pausing for a few minutes each time to watch with them. She was standing behind Laura, leaning her arms on the couch and resting her chin on Laura’s head, when Prince Humperdink told Westley, “You truly love each other, and so you might have been truly happy. Not one couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the storybooks say.” Mom hummed, the vibrations echoing in Laura’s skull, and said, “Like true mates.”_

_The memory plays on repeat in Laura’s brain when she finally spots him standing in the sunlight on the other side of the street. He’s on the sidewalk outside a bodega, talking with another man, a leather jacket thrown casually over his shoulder, a hand stuffed in the pocket of faded blue jeans. He’s tall, taller than Mom, maybe even taller than Laura, and he’s got to be almost twice her age, which will probably feel odd later. But right now, she’s captivated by his grin, by the line of his throat as he throws his head back laughing, by the way the light catches on the glints of silver in his dark hair. He’s beautiful. For a moment, just a moment, he looks directly at her and she catches a glimpse of crystal blue eyes before he turns his gaze back to his companion._

_He’s_ beautiful _, and the way his scent is filling her lungs and her heart tells Laura he’s_ hers _and she_ wants _in a way that she has never wanted anything before._

Not one couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the storybooks say.

 _And neither does Laura, it seems. Because the wind shifts, and his scent shifts with it, just slightly, and Laura’s heart might actually stop for a moment. The crisp woodsmoke and autumn scent of him is overlaid by leather and sunlight and something ephemeral like frost, but underneath — underneath there is gun oil and ash and_ wolfsbane _._

_So Laura lets Peter pull her back up, commands her legs to stop shaking, and focuses on putting one foot in front of the other until the scent begins to fade. It’s hard, so hard it feels almost impossible, and she does it anyway. She is the future Alpha of the Hale pack, and she will always put her pack before herself, and she doesn’t once turn back._


	2. chapter one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura returns to Beacon Hills

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've messed with some details of the s1 timeline to a) suit my purposes and b) make the timeline make sense. you're welcome in advance.
> 
> warnings for this chapter: off-screen animal death, fairly graphic descriptions of mutilated animal corpse(s), POV character having a panic attack (right at the beginning of the chapter), discussion of pre-canon family deaths, some ableist language, cussing, allusions to transphobic remarks.

She knew it would hurt, coming back to Beacon Hills, but she hadn’t known it would hurt like _this_. She hadn’t known _anything_ could hurt like this. Laura has to pull over, jerking the Camaro off the road to the dirt shoulder of the Northern Californian county highway and shuddering to a stop so poorly managed the car stalls out.

She barely made it over the goddamn county line, Laura thinks bitterly, and that's her last clear thought for a bit as she proceeds to utterly lose her shit. Her lungs won’t work properly, won’t take in air or can’t hold onto it or _something_ because she’s pulling in great big gulping gasps and it’s doing jack-all. She’s lost control of the shift in a way she hasn’t since she was goddamn twelve years old, fangs crowding her mouth and claws sinking into the leather of the steering wheel.

Laura had forgotten what it feels like to be _home_.

Beacon Hills has been Hale territory for generations, going back nearly two hundred years. And yeah, there’s a lot of complicated shit wrapped up in what territory means when the first Hales here were settler colonials and almost certainly pushed indigenous people out of their home. But the fact is that the ground has been watered with Hale blood, and the territory _recognizes_ her. She can feel it singing in her blood, the sense of belonging — this place belongs to her and she belongs to it and she hadn’t remembered that it was like _this_ and Laura _aches_.

She closes her eyes, ignoring the wetness gathered there, and tries to focus on the breathing exercises she learned — what, three therapists ago? Ohio, she’s pretty sure. She and Derek had been in Columbus for nearly two years, which meant there'd been time for Laura to build them identities and get health care and drag her little brother to therapy. Yeah, that was the therapist with the breathing exercises. Good guy, Laura remembers, half-counting the seconds between gasping, wheezing breaths. Helped her a lot, didn’t ask any questions when Laura refused medications — she still has no idea how anxiety meds work with werewolf physiology, and there’s no one left she trusts enough to ask. She breathes out, and tries to remember the therapist’s name. She can’t, and breathes in, recalling instead the details of his office. A couch — hideous brown and orange tweed, the ugliest and most comfortable piece of furniture Laura’s ever met. Art on the far wall — bland, abstract, soothing earth tones. His armchair — simple, classic brown leather, well-worn to that soft, buttery texture old leather gets; Laura can remember the soothing smell of it even now. Her claws recede as Laura tries to bring to mind the carpet — worn thin with age, a blueish gray that had probably once been just blue. Sun-faded, she remembers. There’d been a large window overlooking the parking lot to the right of the couch.

Laura lets out a final heavy breath and opens her eyes again, blinking the tears she’s still adamantly ignoring from her clumped eyelashes. Her grip is still white-knuckled, but her hands are fully human; her teeth are small and blunt and fit neatly behind her lips. She counts her way through one more cycle of shuddering breaths before restarting the Camaro and pulling back onto the dark road. Thank God she left Derek behind in New York — if she’s reacting this badly, Laura can’t even imagine how fucked up Derek would be, feeling the pull of their ancestral home in his blood.

The first email arrived two weeks ago, from an anonymous address that rejected any attempts at replies and resisted all Laura’s admittedly limited efforts to trace it. No subject line, no body of text — frankly, Laura’s amazed it got through the spam filters — just a jpeg attachment. The file was titled _greetings from beacon hills_ and Laura felt the fear bubbling at the back of her throat even before she opened it and saw the photo.

A deer carcass on the forest floor, throat slashed, blood soaking into the ground around her. A large spiral had been carved deep into the flesh of the doe’s flank, and blood matted the fur at its edges. Even before zooming in on the jagged edges of the spiral, Laura knew it had been cut into the deer with a claw.

It was her family’s spiral. It was a call for vengeance. Someone left Laura a calling card in Beacon Hills, and she’s taken her sweet time in responding to it.

The second email arrived a week after that, same format from the same address. The file this time was called _im waiting laura_.

This photo was worse. Laura assumed the...pieces were from a doe, because the sender seems like the kind who’d stay with a theme, but it wasn’t exactly recognizable. Blood and shattered bone and torn entrails, strewn across the ground in a forest clearing. Laura recognized the place — she and Derek and Cora spent a lot of full moons running wild through the preserve, while Philip preferred to stay closer to home with his books and tea and sweaters, because he’d been born an old man. The viscera that was artfully arranged in the clearing in the photograph felt like it was trying to taint those memories, somehow: the revenge spiral again.

Laura got in the car and started driving the next day.

It’s sometime after midnight when Laura arrives in Beacon Hills proper. She’s exhausted. Driving from New York to California alone is no small feat, and she just did it in four days. She’s barely slept, been running on gas station coffee and energy drinks, and her meltdown earlier leeched what little energy she had left. She desperately needs to rest, and there’s nowhere really safe to seek it.

She longs for home, for the house where she grew up. She’s only a few miles away when she realizes she's been driving there on autopilot, and she has to pull over again to breathe a new wave of grief into something more manageable.

Laura wants to go home, and home is gone.

In her despair, she can’t bear the thought of going to a motel. The layers of industrial cleaner and years upon years of strangers’ smells is too much, and the mere idea makes her stomach roil. She has no friends here, not anymore; Laura had stopped all attempts at contact years ago in her efforts to keep her tiny broken pack off the grid. She’d settle for an ally, but she’s not sure if she’s got any of those left, either. If Mom was here, she’d maybe tell Laura to go to Deaton; but Mom is gone, and she took Laura’s trust of the emissary with her.

In the end, Laura opts to park in the lot of the 24-hour convenience store, lean the driver’s seat as far back as it’ll go, and curl up under her heavy leather jacket for a few hours.

She’s slept in worse places.

Laura is woken in the thin, grey light of early morning by someone rapping sharply on her window. She startles up in her seat, cursing how tired she must’ve been to let her guard down like that, and turns to the window. There’s a man standing just outside the driver’s side door, bending slightly to look into the window with a frown. He’s in the khaki uniform of the county sheriff’s office, and Laura tenses in response to the sight. Law enforcement hasn’t exactly been her friend, these past few years.

The man gestures for Laura to roll down her window, and, cautiously, she does. He starts to say something about getting a call from one of the cashiers inside, but Laura’s distracted by the man’s scent — it’s familiar, and she can’t quite place it, but…

It hits her, suddenly: a memory of steady arms catching her when her knees gave out at her first sight of the still-smoking skeletal remains of what had once been her home; of soothing words in a shaking voice, steady hands with a shock blanket, questions about if she and Derek had anywhere to stay.

She cuts the man off mid-sentence, her voice still raspy with what little sleep she managed. “Deputy Stilinski?”

He stops, frown deepening between his brows as he studies her face. She can tell the moment he recognizes her: his face goes a little slack with surprise and his scent takes on a tint of old sorrow. “Laura Hale?”

“Yeah,” she says, and manages a bit of a half smile. “Shit, it’s been a while.”

Stilinski huffs a small, amused sound. “You don’t say.” His face is serious again, though, when he asks, “You okay, kid? What are you doing, sleeping in your car?” He eyes the Camaro with suspicion, which Laura thinks is pretty rich; she distinctly remembers his wife driving a hideous blue Jeep.

“Just got in last night,” she tells him, rolling her shoulders with a wince. As she comes more fully awake, she regrets sleeping in her car more and more. She’s getting too old for this shit, she thinks. “Pretty late. Was —” She clears her throat, and her mouth finishes before her brain can catch the vulnerability. “I was halfway to the old house when I remembered…”

Stilinski looks gutted. There’s a sympathetic grief there, more than the remembered sorrow of the Hale fire; this is something more personal, more recent than Laura’s loss, and she wonders what's happened to him in the past six years. He gets ahold of himself pretty quick, though, and asks gruffly, “You got any place to stay?”

Laura shrugs, looks away. The question, the look on his face — she’s 21 again, clutching Derek’s hand and trying to put herself back together. “I can probably get a hotel, now that I’m awake enough to think clearly.”

Stilinski is silent for a moment, and Laura can practically _feel_ him narrowing his eyes at the side of her face in skepticism. He nods once, and says decisively, “You’re coming home with me. We’ve got a guest bedroom, and can put you up ‘til you get on your feet. Your brother with you?” He adds, looking deeper into the car as if Derek might be curled up in the shadows. Laura shakes her head, and he nods again. “Come on, then. If we go now, I can probably convince my son to help cook breakfast before he goes to his friend’s place. Follow me.”

He doesn’t so much as wait for Laura’s assent before turning back toward the patrol car Laura now sees parked two spaces away. She can’t help but smile at the matter-of-fact, aggressive hospitality. She’d forgotten this aspect of life in Beacon Hills, the small-town-ness of the place. New York is huge and bustling and anonymous and Laura loves it with every beat of her heart, but no one would’ve blinked to see her sleeping in her car in New York; no one would’ve seen it and said simply, _you’re coming home with me_.

Stilinski lives in a quiet residential area on the opposite side of town from the Preserve, in a house that looks like every new construction suburban home in the country. There’s something comforting in its blandness, Laura thinks, as she pulls up past the mailbox and parks just off the street — no room in the short driveway. Stilinski himself is parked next to that horrible Jeep, looking a little worse for wear but nonetheless exactly as Laura remembers. She can’t help the small smile that comes to her face at the sight; she’ll have to give Claudia shit for her ridiculous sentimentality when they go in.

The Deputy is on his phone when he gets out of the car, talking quietly to someone at the station. Laura opens her door and clambers out, going around to root about in the trunk for her duffel and pretending not to listen in.

“...just came straight home, but I’ll be in again tonight, so I can fill out the paperwork for it then. No, it wasn’t anything —” He cuts off and glances over at Laura. She doesn’t look up, acts like she doesn’t see it, and he continues. “Remember the Hale kids? It was Laura Hale. Guess she just got back in town, didn’t think to get a hotel.” He pauses, and Laura can hear the murmur of another voice. He’s too far away for her to easily eavesdrop on the other half of the conversation, and she’s too tired to bother. “Yeah,” Stilinski says after a moment. “Well, I brought her home, told her we’d put her up in the guest room. Claudia and Talia were friends, and —” His voice breaks, and that grief is back, strong enough that Laura catches the change in his scent from twenty feet back. Laura freezes, a sudden, horrible suspicion taking root in her mind. He takes a deep breath, and finishes, “And Claudia wanted to kidnap Laura and Derek after everything anyway, so I figure it’s the least I can do.”

There’s another minute or so of conversation, but Laura tunes out of it. She hadn’t known that about Claudia, hadn’t thought that there was a place she and Derek would’ve been welcome after they lost everything they’d ever known. For a few seconds, she allows herself to wonder how different their lives would have been if they’d stayed; if Laura had allowed herself to trust someone outside of her decimated pack. If she hadn’t tried to do everything on her own. Just a few seconds, and then she shakes herself, shoulders her bag, and shuts the trunk of the Camaro, wincing a bit at the way the noise echoes in the empty morning.

“Stiles is on his last couple days of winter break,” Stilinski tells Laura as he unlocks the door. He’s not exactly bothering to be quiet as they step in and he continues. “So he’s probably still in bed, but don’t worry about the noise. Kid sleeps like the dead.”

The house is clean, if a little cluttered. There’s a bunch of lacrosse gear leaning against the wall in the entryway that reeks to high heaven. Seriously, it’s gotta be rank enough to bother even human noses. Laura must make a face, because Stilinski catches her glance and winces.

“Yeah, he’s sixteen,” he says, like that’s all the explanation required. Which, to be fair, it probably is. Laura can hardly remember what teenage Derek was like before the fire, but she’s sure he had to be smelly and awful, too. “I’ve got no idea how his gear gets so gross, since, from everything he says, he never gets any play on the field, but. What can you do?”

“Make him keep it outside?” Laura suggests, only half-joking. Stilinski laughs.

Laura takes inventory of the house as she follows Stilinski to the kitchen. A few pairs of shoes by the door, all Stiles’s by the looks of them — beat up and covered in dirt with frayed laces. There’s dust on most of the picture frames in the hallway, and the little shelf of knickknacks. The kitchen table is strewn with file folders and empty coffee mugs and a couple high school textbooks, and there are dishes in the sink. The room smells vaguely like someone burnt frozen pizza in the oven last night, with a layer of dish detergent on top. She can smell the Deputy’s cologne, and the Irish Spring soap he uses and that he hasn’t showered in a couple of days; she can smell the overwhelmingly obnoxious stench of teenage boy (hormone soup and bad body spray, basically). But nowhere can Laura catch the scent of the light floral perfume that Claudia wears.

Claudia’s shoes aren’t by the door. The gardens outside are dead and overgrown, though Laura remembers that Claudia’s scent was always green and earthy, even in winter. The scent patterns that map out the day-to-day life in this house are hollow without the expected feminine counterpoint. The horrible suspicion from outside settles in Laura with an aching, familiar sorrow. Claudia’s gone.

In the kitchen, Stilinski has gone straight for the coffeemaker and gotten lost in the routine of grinding beans and filling the pot. When that delicious burnt smell hits the air, he heaves a sigh and turns back to Laura.

“It’s pretty early for a vacation day, but what do you say we try to wake the kid up with the smell of food?”

Laura manages something like a grin for him. “Sounds good to me. How can I help?”

Stilinski answers immediately. “Go through the freezer and dig out the bacon. The little shit likes to hide it from me, but I know he’s got some in there somewhere.”

“Are you dragging me into some family feud before I’ve been in your house ten minutes?” Laura accuses lightly even as she starts digging through the freezer. It doesn’t take long to find the bacon, if only because now that the thought is in her head she’s honed in on the smell like it’s a goddamn hunt. The kid really does hide it, though: the package of bacon is literally stuffed _inside_ a bag of frozen peas. What the hell.

“Such baseless accusations in my own home,” Stilinski says, voice dry and unoffended. “Never been so insulted in my life. Oh, good, you found it. Give it here.”

They work in near silence for the next few minutes. Stilinski puts Laura in charge of the bacon the second the coffee maker beeps to indicate the pot is ready. He pours them each a cup, seeming pleased when Laura says she’ll take hers black.

“Stiles fills his with so much milk and sugar it barely resembles coffee anymore,” he tells her dolefully. “I’ve got no idea where I went so wrong with the kid.”

Before Laura can do more than chuckle in response, there’s a clumsy series of thumps and thuds from the second floor. She tilts her head to listen, then tells Stilinski, “I think your plan to wake him worked.”

Sure enough, a few more seconds brings a sound like a small herd of elephants falling down the stairs. Laura’s actually a little impressed that one adolescent human can make that much noise. Stiles emerges into the kitchen, blinking sleep from his eyes and already talking.

“I can smell that, Dad, that’s the real stuff. You’re not supposed to have real —” He’s interrupted by his own body, words giving way to a jaw-cracking yawn, but it doesn’t stop him for long. “Real bacon. Give it here, what do you think you’re doing?”

He makes grabby hands at his father, who is watching the antics over the edge of his coffee mug with open amusement. It takes a second for Stiles to realize that his dad isn’t actually in possession of any bacon at the moment, and he squints at Stilinski, sleepy and suspicious.

“We have a guest, Stiles,” Stilinski informs his son. “I’m not feeding her that turkey bacon shit you bought. You know as well as I do that it’s an abomination in the eyes of God and man.”

Stiles opens his mouth, presumably to argue, but then closes it and frowns. Laura can actually _see_ the moment when his brain catches up to his father’s words, and he says instead, “A guest?” even as he turns to look at Laura, standing over the stove.

She gives him a grin and a little wave with the tongs she’s using to flip the bacon. “Morning, starshine!” She greets him cheerfully. “Your dad’s right, you can’t feed me turkey bacon. I’d probably go full feral, and that’s not a pretty thing for anyone.”

Despite her chipper demeanor, Stiles seems a little horrified at Laura’s presence in his kitchen. In the seconds since he saw Laura, he’s backed up toward the doorway and hunched in on himself, bunching up his shoulders and crossing his arms over his chest like the oversized lacrosse hoodie he’s wearing isn’t covering enough of him. She’s pretty sure he’s building up to fleeing the scene entirely, bacon argument be damned, when he frowns sharply and stills.

For a moment, they’re locked in a staring contest, Stiles searching her face like it’s the key to the daVinci code and Laura just raising her eyebrows while she waits for the kid to explain the look. Then he says, voice flat and surprised, “You’re Cora Hale’s sister.”

It’s like a fucking blow to the solar plexus.

Laura had forgotten that the Stilinskis’ kid was in the same class as Cora. The family had only moved to Beacon County maybe two years before the fire, and Laura hadn’t paid much attention beyond Mom’s friendship with Claudia. Beacon Hills is full of ghosts, and Laura knew that coming in, she really did. It’s why she slept in her car last night, after all. But looking at Stiles, gangly and awkward in the manner of teenagers in the middle of a growth spurt, no longer quite in control of their own limbs; voice breaking with puberty, evidence of his age in the chemistry and pre-calc textbooks — it’s all a slap-in-the-face reminder of everything Laura’s lost. Looking at Stiles, it’s like Laura’s looking at the physical proof of everything her baby sister will never get to be.

Cora was only ten when she died.

“Yeah,” Laura manages to croak out after what feels like a small eternity. She clears her throat and turns back to the bacon, the sizzle-snap of the fat the loudest sound in the kitchen. She tries again. “Yeah, I’m Laura.”

“I remember you.” He’s still squinting at her though, like he’s not entirely sure he likes what he remembers. Laura wracks her brain, but can’t find any significant interactions with Claudia’s kid.

She shrugs and says, “My mom was friends with your mom.”

Stiles sucks in a startled breath, and the wave of grief that hits Laura from both him and his father is so strong that she knows the stench will stick in her nose for hours yet. Laura drags her gaze from Stiles to his father, and asks quietly to confirm what she already knows. “Claudia died?”

Stilinski nods, jaw tight and voice tighter when he responds. “About four years ago.”

“I am so sorry.”

Stilinski nods again, but doesn’t say anything more. Laura gets it. Words aren’t enough; they never are.

Stiles is done with this part of the conversation, though, and his voice is sharp in the quiet. “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing here now.”

Stilinski sighs in a way that implies he’d be burying his face in his hands, if said hands weren’t occupied with his coffee mug. “Son,” he begins, exasperated, but Laura waves him off.

“It does explain why your dad brought me home after finding me sleeping in my car,” she tells the kid simply. “As to why I’m here in Beacon Hills?” Laura rolls her shoulders and turns back to the stove. “If you want to make eggs and toast while I finish the bacon, I can tell both of you over food.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Laura can see Stiles hesitate, looking between her and his dad before he subsides. “Fine. I’m just gonna…” He trails off and slouches toward the doorway again. “Get dressed first.”

“Kid, it’s barely eight in the morning,” Stilinski starts, but Stiles is already gone.

“I was never that eager to change out of my pjs,” Laura observes. Then, “I’m sorry for bringing up Claudia. I didn’t know.”

Stilinski nods, and pours himself some more coffee. “You couldn’t have. It’s just that, well. Stiles and I don’t talk about her much, these days.” His voice cracks with regret, but Laura gets it. God, does she.

“Yeah,” she agrees in a similar tone. “Derek and I don’t talk much about our family either.”

They’re quiet again, until the sound of Stiles tromping back downstairs overtakes the cooking bacon. He’s wearing jeans now, but the same hoodie as before, and Laura can’t help but be amused by such a teenage definition of _getting dressed_. He’s awake enough now to launch back into his rant about his father’s eating habits as he starts to rifle through the fridge.

“I’ll let you get away with the guest excuse this time,” he grumbles. “But if you’re having real bacon I get to put vegetables in the eggs.”

Stilinski winces. “Kid, really?”

“Absolutely,” Stiles tells him firmly. He emerges from the fridge with hands full: a red pepper, yellow onion, a bag of...spinach? and a carton of eggs. “And I’m cooking with olive oil, not butter.”

“You’re killin’ me, son,” Stilinski sighs, resigned.

“No, I’m preventing your otherwise inevitable curly-fry-induced heart attack. So, opposite, really. Scoot over,” he adds to Laura, shoving himself and a frying pan in next to her at the stove.

Laura pokes at the bacon once more and backs off. Grabbing her coffee from the counter, she goes and settles in the chair next to Stilinski and watches Stiles at work.

He doesn’t look over at them at all while he cooks, but keeps up a steady stream of chatter, mostly about the benefits of various veggies and something about cholesterol and a bunch of vaguely disgusting information about the molecular structure of arterial plaque. It’s all accompanied by a lot of flailing and violent hand gestures. Stilinski looks on in amused silence, making noncommittal noises at regular intervals in a manner which suggests that he’s heard many a variation on this lecture.

Laura goes back to the stove when she finishes her coffee and pokes at the bacon a bit more with the tongs before calling it good and turning off the burner. Things progress pretty quick from there, and then they’re all sitting around the table with heaping plates of veggie scramble and bacon and fresh cups of coffee all around. Even Stiles shuts up while they all stuff their faces.

Laura hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she lifts the first bite of food to her mouth, and then she’s _ravenous_. She’s halfway through her plateful of food when she realizes it’s probably because she hasn’t had a real meal in days. Oops?

Eventually, the three of them are done scraping their plates, and Stilinski leans back in his chair to study Laura. Stiles doesn’t even try for subtlety, settling instead for crossing his arms and watching Laura with clear suspicion. She meets the kid’s gaze and pointedly rolls her eyes, but she takes her cue. For a moment, Laura sits in silence, holding her coffee and thinking of where to begin.

She thinks about her thought process last night in the car, the realization that she had no friends or allies left in her hometown. There’s only Peter, basically comatose in long-term care, and Laura hasn’t so much as called him in years. But now, she looks closely at Stilinski, the bruised circles of sleeplessness under his eyes and the rumpled uniform. She thinks about the easy way he’d opened his home, his nonchalance in making his son aware of her presence. She thinks about his wife, of Claudia’s bright determination and the spark of mischief in her eye that Laura suspects Stiles has inherited with interest. Laura knows Mom had trusted Claudia, and though she’s pretty sure none of the Stilinskis know about werewolves, she used to suspect that Claudia knew the Hales were more than human. She thinks again of that night six years ago, of Stilinski’s arms around her as she collapsed under the weight of her grief. And Laura thinks she might have an ally in Beacon Hills after all.

“You remember the fire,” she starts, and it’s not a question. Of course he does; she’s sure they both do. It was the kind of tragedy that looms larger than life in small-town gossip, and the Hales had been an old and prominent family, before they were all dead. “After I got Peter set up at the hospital, I took Derek and took off. We never intended to come back.”

“I kinda figured,” Stilinski allows, filling the quiet between them as Laura mulls over how much to tell them. “I tried looking for you kids a couple of times. When we closed the case, or when the county decided the house and land were government property now.” Well that sucks, Laura thinks. She’ll have to fix that, if she’s here long enough. “You two were like ghosts, though.”

“We had to be,” she says, and opts for the blunt truth. “The fire wasn’t an accident. I had to get Derek out before whoever set it decided to finish the job.”

Stiles sucks in a sharp breath at that, but stays blessedly quiet. Stilinski’s mouth thins, but he’s not, Laura notices, entirely surprised.

“I never liked that it was determined to be accidental,” he admits. His mouth twists in a disapproving grimace. “Wilson wouldn’t listen to me when I asked to keep the case open.”

“That’s because Wilson’s a prick,” Laura says, automatic. She’s...pleasantly surprised that this man, this virtual stranger, had fought for her family’s justice when no one else was left to do so. “He’s not still Sheriff, is he? I really don’t want to have to deal with him while I’m in town.”

Stiles smothers a laugh in his fist, and Stilinski smiles. “He...resigned a couple years back. Saved himself the dignity of losing re-election. You’re looking at the current Sheriff of Beacon Hills,” he adds, just a little smug.

Laura looks at him appraisingly and nods once. “Well done,” she tells him, and means it more than she expects. Taking out her phone, she adds, “And frankly that makes my life a lot easier. I wouldn’t have bothered involving law enforcement if Wilson was still in charge, but if it’s you…” She opens the email app and slides her phone across the table to Stilinski. “I got the first one two weeks ago; the second eight days later. I left New York the next morning.”

Stilinski frowns as he looks at the messages, taking care to study the attached files before sliding the phone back to Laura. His mouth is tight and his voice serious when he speaks. “Hikers found that deer off the side of a trail in the Preserve, probably a day after you got that. We’ve been trying to figure out what the hell it’s about. Throat ripped out by a wild animal — mountain lion, maybe? — but no animal carved that into its side.”

Laura might beg to differ, but that’s neither here nor there. And anyway, Stiles cuts in before she can say anything.

“What are you guys talking about? I wanna see the threatening emails.” He’s making grabby hands again, and Laura wants to smile in spite of herself. Stilinski opens his mouth, possibly to object, but Laura’s already tossed the phone to Stiles. Kid grew up with this technology; she’s no doubt Stiles will be able to glean at least as much from a glance at the emails as Laura’s gotten in the past two weeks.

“Ooh, this second one is disgusting!” Stiles exclaims, clearly delighted. He starts tapping away at Laura’s phone, and she’s too amused to be offended by the bold violation of privacy. “I’m forwarding these to myself, just FYI.” He pauses to consider, then grins. “And also Scott. He’s gonna hate me.”

“That boy’s tolerance for your shit is one of the wonders of the world,” Stilinski grumbles, but he makes no move to stop Stiles. Laura gets the feeling that Stilinski has learned to pick his battles sparingly when it comes to his son’s antics. “So someone sent you pictures of mutilated animals as an invitation home?” He’s doing something skeptical with his eyebrows.

“More or less, yeah.”

“Care to shed some more light on that?” It’s disguised as a casual question, but Laura can sense the steel beneath it. She imagines it’s a tone that comes in handy, working in law enforcement.

She sighs. “As much as I can. I have no idea who sent them, and I haven’t been able to trace the email at all. Can’t even reply to the address — it just bounces back, tells me the email isn’t valid.”

“Is it a threat?”

Laura hesitates, because isn’t that the question of the hour. “I’m...not sure. And if it is a threat, I’m not exactly sure it’s aimed at me.”

Stilinski frowns. “Explain.”

“The spiral — my family places a lot of meaning on the triskele,” Laura starts. She thinks of the black lines of it burned between her shoulder blades, between Derek’s shoulder blades. “It’s — here,” she says, and picks up her fork. In the remnants of grease and egg on her plate, Laura sketches the symbol for the Stilinskis to see. “It’s a whole thing,” she tells them, and gives a sort of general, all-encompassing gesture. “A sort of trinitarian philosophy that can mean any number of things: life/death/rebirth, earth/water/sky, past/present/future. But in my family, the single spiral, like the one on the deer, or in the meadow, is only used to mean vengeance.”

Stilinski frowns. “Someone carved a symbol into a dead deer just to send you a picture to tell you they want revenge?”

“Seems that way,” Laura shrugs.

Stiles snorts. “Seems like overkill, but okay.”

Laura turns to look at the kid full-on, giving him a hard, flat stare. In a voice that matches the look, she reminds him, “No, Stiles, overkill is trapping eleven people in a house and _burning them alive_.”

Stilinski lets out a rush of air, and Laura can’t quite tell if it’s in sympathy or an apology for his kid being Like This. To Stiles’s credit, he scrunches up his face and does a weird little nod, as if to say, _yeah, that’s fair_ , and waves for Laura to continue.

She sighs again, and tugs at the end of her braid, which is mostly unraveled from days of driving with the windows down and then, you know, sleeping in her car. “Thing is, I can’t think of who’d’ve sent it.” Laura can hear the frustration seeping into her tone. “It has to be about the fire, but the only people left to ask for revenge are me and Derek.”

Stilinski frowns and asks, “Didn’t you have an uncle who survived? The one you mentioned earlier, getting him set up before skipping town.”

“Peter,” Laura agrees. “But he’s...as far as the nurses have told me, he’s still basically comatose. Physically, he’s healed as well as can be expected, but he’s totally unresponsive. It’s difficult to imagine him sneaking out of assisted living to mutilate a deer corpse in the middle of the night.”

Stilinski makes a little noise that Laura thinks is meant to be agreement, but mostly he just continues to frown at the universe. “Whoever it was, they wanted you here,” he says at last, and Laura nods agreement. “So why did you come?”

Laura has to actually think on that for a moment. She can’t really explain that, six years absent or no, this is _her_ territory. Even sitting in this quiet suburban house in the morning sunshine, sipping the dregs of strong drip coffee, Laura can feel the homecoming song of her territory in her blood. It’s almost as strong as the pull of the moon, but different, too. This is more like gravity. She feels grounded and steady and ready for anything, in a way that she had forgotten she could feel. Whoever sent those pictures had _violated_ this place, violated the ghosts that Laura feels tugging at her heartstrings. It’s her responsibility to set this right.

“They sent it to my school email address,” she says at last. “I’m in grad school, finishing up a master’s thesis. That means that they know where I live, where _Derek_ lives. We — we’ve moved around a lot, these last few years,” she tells them, and drops her eyes to the kitchen table.

How to explain the fear of their cross-country flight? She thinks again of the couch in the therapist’s office in Ohio. Laura had been half-tempted to steal it and take it with her when she and Derek had to flee in the middle of the night. They’d been in the grocery store, bickering over what brand of ice cream to get because, at the end of the day, they are siblings first and foremost. It was starting to get vicious, because Derek is a goddamn reese’s cup purist when it comes to peanut butter cups in his ice cream, when they’d cut off mid-argument. Both of them had smelled it almost simultaneously: gun oil and aconite and silver. They didn’t bother to pinpoint the source, opting instead to leave the grocery store without any ice cream at all. They’d been packed and in the car and gone within two hours.

“New York is the first place we’ve really gotten the chance to _settle_ , to have real lives. I went back to school, I bullied Derek into getting his Associate’s. We’ve both got jobs. I don’t want whoever this is to come to us there, don’t want anything fucking up our lives. I’ve worked so hard to give us even this much.” Laura meets Stilinski’s eyes, and tries to figure out how to say this. “They made this personal, they brought my family history into it, and they _know where we live_. I want to keep as many thousands of miles between Derek and whatever this is as I possibly can.”

Stilinski seems to get it, because he sighs and nods. He reaches into the chest pocket of his uniform and pulls out a business card. Handing it to Laura, he taps an email address on it. “Forward me those emails,” he says. “I’ll see what we can find with all our law enforcement databases.”

“Thanks, Sheriff,” Laura says, and she’s a little surprised by the strength of the wave of relief that washes over her.

“Call me John, kid,” he tells her fondly. “If you’re staying with us.” He loses himself briefly to a comically huge yawn before he continues. “Speaking of, Stiles, I need you to show Laura the guest room and everything. I gotta get some shut-eye.” Laura must make some show of her skepticism at that — which is totally fair, she thinks, given the amount of coffee she just saw the man drink — because he adds, “I’m mostly on night shifts this week. You caught me at the tail end of a shift.”

“Uh, Laura, you’ve got three missed calls from _Der Bear_ ,” Stiles interrupts, gleeful amusement in his voice.

“Aw, shit,” Laura mutters; and then, “Hey, give me my phone back you little beast.” She hadn’t even realized he still has it, and she moves to rectify this immediately. Stiles makes an admirable attempt to dodge her lunge, but Laura has the advantage of a) having finished the flailing stage of puberty a solid decade ago, and b) motherfucking werewolf skills. In two seconds flat she has her phone back and Stiles has toppled onto the floor.

Laura’s feeling awfully smug about it.

She hears Stiles complaining to his father about rude houseguests — maybe so — and Stilinski telling the kid he brought it on himself — very true — but Laura’s busy listening to the ringing of Derek’s phone.

 _“Lo, I swear to god if you’re dead in a ditch I’ll kill you myself,”_ Derek greets the second he picks up.

“It’s good to be loved, baby brother,” Laura coos, voice saccharine. Derek hates it when she uses this voice. “I miss you already, too.”

 _“You made it okay?”_ The concern in Derek’s voice is trying to be grudging, but he’s not quite managing it. Her little brother is a grumpy ass, but he’s also unbearably sweet.

“Yeah, I got in late last night. Fell asleep before I remembered to call, so. Sorry about that.” She elects to leave out literally everything else about last night, from the breakdown on the side of the road to the overwhelming despair of driving home on autopilot. “Remember Deputy Stilinski?”

She can _hear_ Derek’s frown. It’s adorable, really. _“The cop with the shock blankets?”_ And of course that’s how Derek remembers him.

“Yeah. Mom was friends with his wife, Claudia, remember?”

_“Huh. Never made that connection.”_

“That’s because you’re an idiot, hon,” she informs him, fond. “I’m staying with Stilinski and his kid.”

There’s a silence on the other end for a moment, and then, _“The kid...he’s Cora’s age, isn’t he?”_

“Yeah,” Laura says, and feels that same gut-punch feeling as when Stiles had thrown the name at her earlier. “He’s sixteen now. I’m pretty sure he drives his mom’s horrible Jeep. Can you — can you imagine teaching Cora to drive?”

Derek makes a little wounded sound, and Laura immediately regrets her words. She doesn’t want to be alone in the grief that looking at Stiles has brought up, but she hates hurting Derek like this. _“She’d be a nightmare,”_ Derek croaks at last. _“The road rage alone would be apocalyptic.”_

Laura manages a weak laugh, grateful for this moment. “Seriously.”

They’re quiet for a little bit after this, and Laura becomes aware again of Stiles lingering awkwardly in the background. A wave of exhaustion hits her, and she suddenly misses her little brother something fierce. They haven’t been apart for more than 24 hours in six years. And maybe that’s not healthy for two grown adults, but it is what it is. They are all each other has.

 _“You’ll be okay?”_ Derek asks eventually.

“Yeah, Der-Bear,” she reassures him, using his childhood nickname just to be obnoxious. Sure enough, Derek makes an annoyed little sound on the other end. Laura smiles. “I’m good. I just want to take care of a few things, but I’ll be home before you know it, kay? Think of it this way,” she adds, letting her voice go sly and teasing. “You’ve got the place all to yourself for the first time ever. You can throw a rager. You can host an orgy!”

Derek makes a choked-off sound of disgust, and Laura outright grins, picturing the look of horror sure to be painting his face. _“You’re awful, Laura,”_ he grumbles once he’s recovered enough to speak. _“Jesus Christ, what is_ wrong _with you?”_

“You love me,” she tells him.

 _“Wish I didn’t.”_ Derek grumbles something else that, if it is words, is too soft for Laura to understand. _“Be careful, okay? And fucking_ call me _when you say you’re going to call me.”_

“You’re not the boss of me,” Laura sing-songs. Before Derek can get grouchy about it, she adds, “And I will. I straight up fell asleep in the car last night before coming to the Stilinskis’, D. That’s the only reason I forgot to call. I won’t forget again, promise.”

_“You better not. I’ll talk to you tonight.”_

“You will. Love you to the moon.”

 _“And back again,”_ Derek responds, automatic. She knows he pretends to think it’s cheesy, but the traditional back-and-forth and one of the only things they have left of their family. It’s this and the triskele tattoos, and each other.

When she hangs up the phone and turns, Laura sees Stiles watching her with an indecipherable look on his face. She feels a bit like he’s sizing her up, which is frankly adorable of him.

“Did you really just tell your little brother to host an orgy while you’re out of town?” is what he eventually settles on saying.

Laura grins at him. “Sure did. Kid’s a prude, and it’s my job as his older sister to give him shit at all times. Keeps him humble.”

Stiles does something complicated with his eyebrows at that, but just says, “Also, Betty is a beautiful majestic beast of burden and I will not have you slandering her in my home.”

“Who?”

“The Jeep,” Stiles clarifies. “Don’t think I didn’t hear you call her horrible. See if I’ll drive you anywhere now.”

“Kiddo, I’ve got a goddamn Camaro. I don’t think I’ll be needing a ride in a local teen’s jalopy.”

“Famous last words,” Stiles warns, shaking a finger at her. “Grab your stuff, I’ll show you the guest room.”

Laura spends most of the morning in the Preserve, hiking the old familiar path to the clearing from the photograph. She takes the long way ‘round, not willing to go within sight of the old house. The trail is overgrown; it was never really popular with folks outside of the Hale family, largely because it cut through their property for large swaths. And humans are, ultimately, prey animals. There’s still something in their prehistoric hindbrains that can tell them to avoid territory controlled by apex predators, even when they don’t recognize it as such.

The clearing _reeks_. Laura can smell the putrid rot nearly two miles out, and it turns her stomach. She has to stop a few hundred feet from the break in the trees to retch off the side of the trail, though she manages to keep most of her breakfast down. Living with wolf senses in New York City has given Laura a stomach of steel, but this is just disgusting.

The spiral of animal parts has been left to fester, and Laura takes a moment to be grateful for the fact that it’s January and they aren’t rotting in summer heat. None of the scavengers of the forest have touched it, and Laura can immediately smell why: the entire clearing stinks of piss and the hormones real wolves use to mark territory. It’s definitely a werewolf, and an alpha, but there’s something _wrong_ with it. It’s more animal than anything else, and it makes Laura’s skin crawl. It reminds Laura of the summer she was nineteen, and a feral omega passed through their territory. She and Mom had tracked it by that sickly-wrong scent. When they found him, he was incoherent and snarling, filthy and covered in old blood. He’d been lost to the wolf, and nothing Mom did could bring him back. They’d had to kill him, and Laura is sick with even the memory of it, of the animal fear in his eyes. Whoever made the spiral, they’re like that, she thinks.

And isn’t that terrifying. Laura stalks around the clearing, occasionally poking at rotting deer carcass and cataloging the scents, gathering information as she goes. The calling card was left by an alpha, male. One who’s gone at least a little feral, though he’s not totally lost to the wolf if he’s carving revenge spirals and emailing the pictures to Laura. Underneath it all, there’s a weird, sick smell, something that reminds Laura of doctors’ offices and disinfectant. And underneath that still, Laura can catch the fading smells of Hales, though they’re far too old now to pull the individual scents of her siblings and parents.

When she’s learned all she can from the disgusting mess, Laura uses her claws to carve a spiral into the bark of a tree at the edge of the clearing, near the trail exit. It’s her acknowledgement that she got the message, and she’s in pursuit.

She goes back to the Stilinskis’ place to shower after that. The sick smell of the crazed alpha is stuck in Laura’s throat and she wants to scrub every trace of it from her skin. It’s also nice to wash away the remnants of her mad race from New York; living in her car for four days certainly did nothing good for her personal hygiene levels.

By the time she’s dressed again, Stilinski is awake and making more coffee in the kitchen. He’s out of his uniform at least, dressed in a paint-splattered police academy t-shirt and faded sweatpants. Stiles is nowhere to be seen. Laura raises her eyebrows.

“You can’t have gotten more than four hours of sleep,” she says in disbelief. The circles under his eyes haven’t faded at all; if anything, they’re more pronounced than before.

He shrugs. “I’ll nap another couple hours this evening before I go in. One of my deputies is out on maternity leave, so,” he shrugs again and gives a tired smile. “We’re all pitching in to cover the graveyard shift.”

Laura studies him for a bit. “I’m glad you’re in charge over there these days.”

“Thanks. It’s definitely been an interesting couple years, trying to figure out how to patch up all the shit Wilson left behind.”

Laura snorts derisively. “I can’t imagine.” It’s weirdly comforting to know that the current Sheriff seems to hold the former one in as much disdain as Laura does. “I went by the clearing from the photo this morning.”

Stilinski stills completely at the topic change, then turns back to the coffee. He grabs a spare mug from the cupboard above him and pours a cup, passing it to Laura with a raised brow.

“Is it all still there?”

Laura can’t help her grimace at the remembered smell. “It sure is. Been rotting there for at least five or six days, and it smells like it.”

Stilinski wrinkles his nose in sympathy. “I’ll contact the Parks folks, see if we can get it cleaned up. That can’t be good for anything in the Preserve.”

Laura nods agreement and sips her coffee. “Think I’ll go visit my uncle this afternoon. I want to check in with the staff to see if anyone’s been to visit, or tried to visit. I really don’t want whoever this is messing with him, too.”

“Good idea.” Stilinski hesitates, watching Laura thoughtfully over the edge of his coffee mug. Finally, he says, “I can reopen the case.”

Laura tightens her grip on her mug. She hadn’t thought about this as a consequence of her words this morning, admitting to Stilinski that she knew the fire was set. She resigned herself years ago to the idea of never knowing which fucking hunter is responsible for the murder of her family. All she knows is that it _was_ a hunter, and that’s only because of the mountain ash she had felt at the scene six years ago, repelling her from the house with a force stronger than Stilinski’s arms holding her back.

She doesn’t know what’s showing on her face, but it’s probably upsetting, because Stilinski sighs and puts his mug down on the counter behind him. Gently, he says, “I don’t want to go digging at your wounds, Laura, especially with whatever psycho is threatening you. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you to even be here. But you’ve been living in fear of the killer for _six years_. You have some reason to believe they might still be after you, after all this time, because you think they want to wipe out your whole family.”

“They do,” Laura says, voice flat and hard.

Stilinski furrows his brow. “And at some point, I’m going to ask why you think that. But right now, you’ve got someone who tracked you down despite all your efforts to disappear and successfully lured you back to Beacon Hills. Has it occurred to you that, if the person who killed your family does still want to kill you and Derek, it might have been them who sent those emails?”

It hasn’t, actually. And if she hadn’t seen the spiral in the woods this morning, she might give more credence to Stilinski’s theory. But it wasn’t a werewolf who killed her family; it _is_ a werewolf desecrating her territory now. Of course, she can’t exactly tell Stilinski that, so she just shakes her head.

“Even if it’s not, there’s a killer out there. You and your brother deserve to feel safe, Laura.” He takes a deep breath, and his voice is rough as he adds, “And your family deserves justice. I can’t give you much, but maybe I can at least give them that.”

Laura nods, blinks back the tears suddenly burning her eyes. Stilinski softens, and reaches out. Gently, so gently, he pries her fingers from the coffee mug and takes it from her, places it on the counter next to his own. And then his arms are around her, are holding her tight like she’s a little kid, like she’s 21 and collapsing in his arms, like he’s a parent with a grieving child. She clutches him back, fingers fisting in his t-shirt, and buries her face in his shoulder and _sobs_. One of his hands comes up and cups the back of her head, and he makes soothing sounds in her ear. It should be awkward, because Laura’s got to be a good two or three inches taller than him, but it isn’t. She feels small and safe and held in a way she hasn’t since her parents were alive.

Laura has known since she was twelve years old that she was going to be the next alpha of the Hale pack. But it wasn’t supposed to be this soon; it wasn’t supposed to be so sudden. She was thrust into the role of alpha, with all the powers and privileges inherent therein, when her mother burnt to death with the rest of her pack. And then it was just Derek and Laura and it was Laura’s job to keep them safe in a world that was suddenly more dangerous than she’d ever suspected.

For the past six years, Laura has had to be strong and solid and steady at all times. Until yesterday, she’d only ever allowed herself to break down in the offices of various therapists. And the therapists helped, yeah, but it was cool and professional and ultimately impersonal. This is the most comfort anyone has given her in six years.

Eventually, her sobs subside, and Stilinski loosens his hold slightly. Instead of gripping her back, he runs a hand lightly up and down her spine until Laura lets go and stands back.

“I think I got snot all over your shirt,” she chokes out, apologetic.

Stilinski smiles at her, and Laura isn’t really surprised to see that his own eyes are wet. “It’s seen worse, kid.”

She kind of loves that he calls her that.

Laura scrubs at her face with her palms, smudging the remaining tears across blotchy cheeks. She takes a deep breath and manages to give Stilinski a weak smile in return. “You give really good hugs.”

He laughs. “I do. Pretty sure it’s a genetic trait. Stilinski hugs are simply the best there are.”

Laura laughs too, and Stilinski hands her coffee back to her. They drink in silence for a while, and it’s only when Laura finishes her own cup that she speaks again. “Do it. Reopen the case.”

The receptionist at the assisted living place is, well. Less than impressed, is probably the kindest way to put it, with Laura. She makes Laura show ID to prove that she’s actually “Mr. Hale’s mysterious niece,” and makes chilly remarks about how _nice_ it is for Laura to _finally deign to visit her uncle._ Laura decides she hates this woman pretty much immediately, but it does answer Laura’s questions about the security of visitation here. The receptionist’s comments about how _lonely_ Peter must be at least confirms that he’s had no visitors.

Just what Laura’s guilt complex needs.

It’s a nice place, though. That’s why Laura picked it, all those years ago. Clean, simple, welcoming. It doesn’t feel like a hospital, and everyone Laura meets after the receptionist seems warm and friendly. Most of the rooms Laura sees as she wanders the halls look homey and lived in, with pictures on the wall and little knickknacks on shelves.

Peter’s room has no such luxuries. The contrast is stark, when Laura steps in. His rooms are bland, all the furnishings clearly provided by the facility, without a single personal touch. It’s not dissimilar to many of the rented rooms Laura and Derek have stayed in over the years, the kind that come furnished. In those early years on the run especially, they hadn’t exactly collected little trinkets to decorate whatever slumlord shithole they ended up in next. Laura decides that, before she leaves town again, she wants to get some stuff for Peter’s room. She has some recent pictures of her and Derek on her phone; she can print them at the drugstore maybe, get cheap frames. Maybe she can get a little cactus or something to brighten the place. He deserves, she thinks, suddenly fiercely homesick, something of his family here. Something that didn’t burn in the fire.

Peter is sitting in a wheelchair by the window, clearly having been rolled there earlier by someone who thought the weak winter sunlight might do him some good. There’s a tree right outside, bare-branched in the January air, with a bird feeder hanging in the branches. As Laura watches from where she stands in the doorway, a little finch or something alights on the edge and pecks at the birdseed in the dish.

Peter doesn’t so much as blink.

Laura takes a chair from the little two-top table in the kitchenette and carries it over so she can sit beside him. She knows the nurses say that he’s not processing any outside stimuli, but she sits on his good side, just in case he can see her. He just sits, unnaturally still, unblinking. It’s horrible.

He doesn’t even _smell_ like Peter anymore.

For a long while, Laura just sits with him in silence, watching the little birds come and go, flitting from branch to branch. Eventually, she begins to speak quietly to him.

“Hey Uncle Peter,” seems like a good start, though the way Laura’s airway closes around the words maybe says otherwise. She clears her throat and tries again. “You look — you look good.” Better than the last time she saw him, anyway, when the burns were still raw and shiny; when half his body was made up of bandages. “I’m sorry it’s been so long. We were running, for years. I couldn’t protect you like that, and this was the best I could do. And I’m sorry.

“Derek and I are settled in New York, now — the city, a little place in Brooklyn. It’s nice. Small, and more expensive than my brain can really process at times, but nice.”

Laura continues in this vein for a long while, just lighthearted updates about what she and Derek have been up to for the past six years. She tells Peter about bullying Derek into getting his Associate’s at one of the CUNY schools, just general studies but at least a degree to put on his resume. She can’t help but smile when she confides that Derek’s favorite classes were arts, that he rents space at a pottery studio and spends two or three nights a week there, frowning over a wheel and spattering himself in clay. She talks about finally getting her own shit together and starting her Master’s program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

“It’s probably a good thing you’re not talking right now,” Laura jokes weakly. “My degree is in Women’s and Gender Studies, and I remember how obnoxious you were about that when I was in undergrad. Unfortunately for you, if you want to shut me up before I tell you, in detail, about my thesis, I suggest you look a little more lively.”

Obviously, Peter fails to look more lively, and Laura tells him all about her thesis. It’s partly a small, petty revenge because Peter really was a dick about Laura’s undergrad women’s studies minor. When Laura was in her freshman year of college and taking her first women’s studies course, she spent an evening jabbering excitedly about her reading for class on contraception and abortion. When Laura paused for breath, Peter took the opportunity to make a snide remark about how, _isn’t the traditional wisdom ‘no uterus, no opinion?’_ Laura had fallen silent, angry and embarrassed. Mom had almost disemboweled Peter right there at the dinner table. Now, Laura takes a pointed delight in detailing her Master’s thesis to her uncle, even if he probably can’t hear or understand her. It’s about the politicization of reproduction in the US over the past two hundred years, and particularly the narrative of privacy and the female sphere.

Eventually, Laura runs out of harmless life updates and falls silent. Peter hasn’t so much as twitched.

Laura goes back to watching the birds out the window and tries to judge how long she’s been there from the angle of the sun. Unfortunately, she’s entirely a city girl these days and gleans absolutely no information from that endeavor, except that time has probably in fact passed.

Quietly, she begins to speak again. “Something bad is happening here, Peter. I don’t know what it is yet, but I don’t like it.” She pauses, mulling over her choice of words. “Someone tracked me down to lure me back here with promises of revenge. I’ve been to the kill sites, and it’s...it’s definitely a werewolf, but it smells _wrong_ . And I know it’s about the fire, but I don’t know _how_ , and I don’t know _why_. I just…” Laura sighs heavily, turns to look at Peter full on. She reaches out with a shaking hand to take Peter’s own hand from his lap. It’s cool and soft and limp in hers. “I’m terrified someone wants to finish the job, Peter. I can’t lose you and Derek, I _can’t_. You’re all I have left.”

Laura would give anything, _everything_ in the world right now for a sign that Peter can hear her. She would just about trade the world for her uncle to do something as simple as squeeze her hand in return.

He doesn’t.

Eventually, Laura lets go, gently puts Peter’s hand back in his lap. She stands, tells him she’ll visit again later this week, and presses a kiss to the top of his head. She breathes deep, desperate for any trace of the man she grew up with, but there’s only disinfectant and plain soap and the unscented generic laundry detergent the facility uses. She can catch the scents of the orderlies who put him in his chair, who bring him his meals, and, only deep down underneath that, the faint trace of rain and earth and Hale.

Laura misses him. He’s right here, and she misses him so damn much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please do not attempt a 3,000+ mile solo trip alone in under a week.


	3. chapter two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Scott and Stiles are left unsupervised to disastrous and lycanthropic results, Peter and Laura have a heart-to-heart, and someone really needs to make a Werewolves 101 powerpoint.  
> Or, werewolves! They're a thing!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter-specific warnings: graphic discussions of injuries (blood and guts, the whole nine yards), graphic violence, even more graphic threats of violence, look it's just a very violent chapter, minor miscellaneous ableist language, cussing.

After all these years, Scott should really be better at _not giving in to Stiles_ , he reflects morosely, even as he hops out of the Jeep and slams the door behind him. Especially when Stiles shows up late at night, and even more especially when he climbs up the side of the porch to Scott’s window rather than knock on the door. Especially when said night is a school night. _Especially_ when Stiles shows up, late on a school night, outside Scott’s window to _drag Scott into the woods to look at dead animal parts_.

Scott sometimes regrets his choice of best friend.

It’s too late now, though: they're already parked at a trailhead at the edges of the woods. Granted, that doesn’t stop Scott from bitching about the whole thing as they walk through the Preserve. Stiles is marching like he’s on a friggin mission, pausing only when Scott reminds him that his best friend is an _asthmatic_ , thank you. Scott’s not entirely sure why they’re doing this anyway; wasn’t that awful picture Stiles forwarded the other day enough?

“Uh, no?” Stiles says, when Scott voices the question. And Scott's not really sure what he was expecting there, because this is _Stiles._ “Obviously not. Look, I heard my dad talking with the Parks people today. They’re finally getting someone to come and clean it all up tomorrow I guess, and I wanna see it before they do that. It’s really weird, man, and it freaked Laura out pretty bad.”

Scott doesn’t really remember the Hales. He knows, vaguely, that one of the kids was in their grade before she died, but that’s about it. When Laura Hale had shown up out of nowhere a couple days ago, it had taken Stiles like five minutes to explain to Scott who she is and why she’s staying with Stiles and his dad, and honestly Scott’s still not entirely clear on that last bit. He did meet Laura briefly yesterday, though, when he biked over to Stiles’s house to play video games and celebrate the last moments of freedom before school starts up again, and it’s true that she doesn’t seem like the kind who gets easily freaked out. She’s taller than the Sheriff, probably like 6’2”, with broad shoulders and a smile that frankly scares Scott a little bit. She wears heavy boots and a leather jacket and drives a fancy black muscle car, and Scott thinks she’s probably really cool if you can get over the intimidation factor. At the very least, Stiles says she’s a good cook, with the caveat that he’s been bitching about the Bacon Incident for days now.

They smell the mess in the clearing long before they get there. It’s disgusting. It’s absolutely revolting and Scott hates Stiles and is never doing anything for him ever again, Jesus Christ.

It’s hard to tell what the animal — animals? — used to be. Because now it's just _pieces_ , torn apart so viciously and already halfway rotted into the ground that Scott can really only even identify bits of bone here and there. The rest of it might be muscle? Or intestine? Maybe a bit of brain? Whatever the hell else a body is made of? Scott's bio grade isn't good enough to come in handy about it right now, so it’s impossible to tell the bits apart, the way they're all torn and mixed together.

Scott might actually puke about how bad this smells.

Stiles, of course, is unbothered, because Stiles is a freak. And normally Scott loves this about him, but right now it’s probably his least favorite Stiles-trait. But whatever. They’re already here, so Scott might as well let Stiles have his fun about it.

He leans back against a tree near the edge of the clearing and watches in a familiar combination of horror and amusement as Stiles walks the spiral of blood and guts. Occasionally, Stiles will exclaim over some particularly gruesome mutilation or interesting bit of bone; at one point, he wrinkles his nose and tells Scott, “Dude, I think some animal pissed all over this.”

“That probably improves the smell at this point,” Scott tells him. And then he sees _it_ behind Stiles and his blood goes cold. Stiles rolls his eyes and opens his mouth to say something — something snarky and obnoxious, probably — but Scott stops him before he can speak. “Stiles,” Scott says, quiet and even, the way he’s seen Deaton talk in the presence of aggressive dogs. “Come back toward the trail.”

There’s something on the other side of the clearing. Something with glowing red eyes. Scott is really hoping for a bear, because he’s pretty sure they’re less likely to attack than a mountain lion, but something about the way it moves seems to suggest _wolf_.

Stiles freezes where he is, which is nearly the opposite of what Scott wants him to do. Slowly, face filling with dread, Stiles asks, “Why?”

“Come here, _now_ ,” Scott tells him. He’s keeping his eyes on the animal across the way, which seems to be circling a tree. It rises up on its back legs and _holy shit that thing is huge_. Whatever the hell it is, it is _way too big_. “Stiles, _we need to leave._ ”

Stiles starts, clearly freaked, and starts power walking back toward Scott, no regard anymore for the spiral of animal bits. Scott spares a second to think that Stiles is probably going to have to actually burn those shoes when they get home, and then the eyes look their way.

It’s seen them.

Everything Scott has ever learned about wilderness safety leaves his mind. He reaches out, grabs Stiles’s hand, and, pulling them both onto the trail, shouts, “ _Run!_ ”

It’s the sound of the front door slamming shut that wakes her. Laura groans in the darkness of the guest room, cursing the existence of teenagers. She rolls over to look at the digital clock on the nightstand, where the glowing red numbers announce that it’s not quite one in the morning. Laura lays there for a moment, idly contemplating the advantages and disadvantages of disemboweling Stiles, and then she hears the frantic voices.

They're irritatingly clear, even through the closed bedroom door. The guest room is just at the top of the stairs, and the voices of Stiles and his friend — Scott — echo up to her. They’re probably trying to be quiet, but they’re not trying very hard, likely because the Sheriff is on duty until seven. Laura frowns. Don’t these idiots have school tomorrow? What the hell were they doing out so late, and why is Scott _here_ , instead of at his own home? There's the groggy beginnings of an internal debate about whether she's too young to play crotchety grandma to the hooligans making so much noise after midnight, and then, well.

And then she hears Stiles say, voice pitched high and alarmed, “Fuck dude, that’s so much blood,” and Laura’s out of bed before Scott has time to reply.

Laura’s not really sure what she was expecting to see after overhearing that little tidbit, but she can say with some certainty that it wasn’t...this. The boys are in the kitchen, standing in a pool of yellow light next to the sink. Stiles is fumbling open a first aid kit of truly ridiculous proportions, while Scott struggles to get his shirt over his head.

“What in the fresh _hell_?” Laura croaks at them, her voice rough with sleep. The boys turn to look at her and freeze. They make a hilarious tableau, really: Scott’s got his shirt mostly over his head, but is stuck with his elbows and most of his face inside so all Laura can really see are wide brown eyes and a shock of dark hair. Stiles is clutching a roll of gauze and what looks like an industrial-sized tube of antibiotic ointment, mouth open in surprise. Laura can practically see the gears turning inside his head, trying to come up with a lie that’ll explain exactly why Scott is in the kitchen at one in the morning with a huge, bleeding bite mark in his side.

Fuck.

“I can explain,” Stiles says, eyes wild in a way that hints that he really, really can _not_ explain.

Stiles smells like he rolled around in dirt and rotting flesh. Giving him a brief once-over, Laura decides that’s probably a good summary of what happened: he’s covered in dirt stains and leaves, including a couple of burrs stuck in his buzz cut, and his sneakers are covered in the reeking mulch of animal guts. The idiots were up at the spiral clearing in the middle of the night.

Scott is still frozen, wound bleeding sluggishly. Laura sighs and steps forward, reaching toward Stiles and the first aid kit.

“Give me something to clean this with,” she tells him. She uses her best imitation of Mom’s Alpha Voice, the one that people, regardless of species or pack status, leaped to obey. “Iodine if you have it in there, alcohol if you don’t. You,” she continues, turning to Scott. “Get that shirt the rest of the way off and get closer to the light. I want to see what I’m doing.”

Both of the boys mutely do as they’re told, and Laura is handed a wad of gauze and, surprisingly, a bottle of iodine. Nice. Once Scott’s gotten his shirt fully off and tossed it onto the floor for the time being, Laura gets close.

He stinks of the Alpha.

Scott, too, has clearly been rolling around in the dirt, maybe even more so than Stiles. The smell of festering animal carcass isn’t as strong on him, and instead he smells mostly of earth and damp and decomposing leaves. But layered over all of it is that sick, _wrong_ smell that had filled the kill site, and Laura is certain of what the bite is before she even touches it.

To his credit, Scott barely flinches when Laura presses the first iodine-soaked bit of gauze to his wound. The bite is deep, tearing into the muscle below the skin in a way that probably should be treated with stitches. The bleeding is already slowing down, though, and that plus the apparently low pain levels Scott is showing tells Laura that the bite is already doing its work.

As she wipes away the last bits of old blood, Laura asks, “Is there a reason you didn’t go to a hospital for this?”

Scott looks at her like she’s crazy. “I can’t go to the hospital. My _mom_ works there! She’d kill me for being in the woods this late on a school night.”

“So what, you decided it was better to get killed from bleeding out from an animal bite in your best friend’s kitchen?” When Scott opens his mouth to respond, Laura raises her eyebrows judgmentally and adds, “That was rhetorical.”

To Stiles, she says, “Give me a gauze pad and the antibiotic ointment. Also, start cutting strips of tape to hold this in place.”

Really, the antibiotic ointment is mostly placebo at this point. Laura’s 90% sure that the bite is taking, in which case it’ll heal on its own by tomorrow night. If it doesn’t take, no amount of iodine or antibiotic ointment is going to stop it from killing the kid. Jesus Christ, how is she going to explain _werewolves_ to these idiot sixteen-year-olds? If the Alpha is as unhinged and animal as Laura suspects, does that make _Laura_ responsible for this hormone-ridden baby wolf in front of her? If that’s the case, how is she going to explain the idiot sixteen-year-olds to _Derek_?

She sighs and gently pats the last of the medical tape into place on Scott’s side. Straightening up, she puts her hands on her hips and glares down at the two teenagers, trying to decide what, exactly, she’s going to do with them.

“Okay. Scott, you need a new shirt, because I am not having this conversation while you’re topless. Stiles, you need to change and to get rid of those shoes, because they are _rank_. You can’t save them. Toss them. No, wait, better idea: burn them.”

“Hey!” Stiles protests, indignant. Laura just narrows her eyes at him and he immediately subsides.

“Then both of you come back and sit your stupid asses at the kitchen table and we’re going to talk about what, exactly, bit you in the woods tonight.”

The boys look at each other and have the kind of silent eyebrow communication that only comes from being friends for years upon years. It’s kinda cute, actually. After a moment, Stiles shrugs and they both go to do as Laura says. Laura sighs heavily and cleans up the mess in the kitchen. She doesn’t bother with Scott’s shirt, just tosses it straight in the trash (she'll have to remember to take that out before the Sheriff gets home, or she'll have to explain things _again_ ). It’s covered in blood and filth and she really doesn’t want to waste time tonight talking about the art of getting bloodstains out of cotton clothing when there’s so much other shit to cover.

The boys come back, Scott tugging at the collar of a t-shirt that is clearly Stiles’s. Stiles is also in a clean shirt and pajama bottoms, and they’ve washed enough of the dirt off the both of them that they at least no longer reek of rotting things, so that's a relief. They sit across from Laura at the table, Scott looking nervous and Stiles mulish in a way that suggests they know they’re in trouble and they _really_ don’t want to deal with any consequences.

Sure enough, Stiles decides to start the conversation with, “You can’t tell my dad.”

Laura gives him a dirty look and says, “Honestly, Stilinski, that is the _least_ of your problems right now.”

Scott swallows audibly.

“You two went up to the clearing in the Preserve, the one with the spiral?” It’s not really a question, more of a chance to see how they’ll handle the conversation.

“How do you know that?” Scott asks, bewildered. Stiles elbows him in the side and shoots him a sharp look. Laura can practically hear Stiles’s mental recitation of their Miranda rights.

“Stiles had viscera on his shoes,” Laura says flatly. To Stiles, she adds, “And this isn’t a police interrogation. You don’t have the right to remain silent. You get to tell me exactly what happened to you tonight, and then you get to listen.”

Stiles glares sullenly at her, whatever gratitude he’d had for her assistance evidently evaporated just like that. Scott, however, seems willing enough to cooperate.

“We just wanted to look at the gross spiral thing before the Park people took care of it,” he tells her earnestly. His big brown eyes make it impossible not to believe him, and Laura has to wonder how often his more conniving best friend has used that to his advantage. “So we drove up, and Stiles was walking around the field looking at everything, when suddenly there was this...thing on the other side of the clearing.” He looks at Stiles and waits a moment for some sort of confirmation. Laura doesn’t see anything, but apparently Scott gets what he wanted because he turns back to Laura. “I thought it was maybe like a bear, or a mountain lion at first?”

Stiles snorts. “Yeah, it definitely wasn’t.”

Scott nods in agreement and hesitates before he says, “I think it was some kind of wolf.”

Stiles sighs heavily, and Laura senses that they’ve had this conversation already tonight. “I told you before, Scott,” Stiles says in exasperation. “ _There are no wolves in California._ Not for like, sixty years.”

More like six, Laura doesn’t say.

“You weren’t the one who had the thing on top of you, ripping into your flesh with actual _fangs_ , Stiles!” Scott retorts. “Also, you heard that howl when we got to the Jeep! It was huge and it was freaky as hell —” He cuts off, eyes going wide in alarm. “Oh god, what if it had _rabies_?”

Stiles’s mouth drops in horror, like he also didn’t consider this possibility. Laura lets them stew in this for just a few seconds, because teenage boys need to be confronted with their own stupidity from time to time, for their own good.

“What color were its eyes?” she asks, once she’s decided they’ve suffered long enough. Stiles gives her a look like, _what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?_

“Red,” Scott says. “They were _glowing_ , too. Bright red.”

Damn. Everything confirmed, Laura sighs heavily. “Right. Well, good news or bad news first?” she asks Scott.

Scott groans. “Good news, please.”

“It doesn’t have rabies.”

Scott heaves his own sigh of relief at that, though it’s short-lived. He visibly braces himself before he asks, “Bad news?”

Laura grins, wide and sharp. “What do you know about werewolves?”

It doesn’t go over well. She can't imagine it ever does, Laura thinks resignedly as she watches the Jeep pull out of the driveway, Stiles bringing Scott back home. Laura could have driven him, but she wants Stiles to suffer sleeplessness for his dumbass decision to drag his best friend into this shit. Laura’s just chock full of petty revenge this week.

When Laura brought up werewolves, Scott had just stared blankly at her, repeating, _werewolves?_ uncertainly. Stiles, on the other hand, had started laughing, and hadn’t stopped until Laura looked him dead in the eye and did a partial shift. The fangs had shut him up real quick, though unfortunately not for long. Stiles recovered in less than a minute, at least enough to squint at the new lines of Laura’s face and demand to know _what the hell happened to her eyebrows?_

Laura had elected to ignore that question and instead deal with the more practical matters of Scott. It was only in trying to explain the transformation that Laura realized she is not at all equipped for this. She’s only known a few bitten wolves in her lifetime, and she was never exactly close with any of them; she doesn’t think she’s _ever_ met someone newly bitten. How the _hell_ is she supposed to explain what it is to be who she’s been her entire life? In the end, she cobbled together a gruesome combination of explaining weird supernatural puberty and the significance of moon phases and that she really hoped Scott didn’t have anger problems because that would complicate things way more than necessary. (Scott assured her he didn’t; Stiles frowned thoughtfully but didn’t contradict him.)

By the time the clock hit three, Laura figured they’d covered about as much as she could hope for in one night. Before making Stiles drive Scott home, she’d given both the boys her phone number, and Scott a stern talking-to about control.

“Your senses are probably going to develop significantly overnight,” she told him. “Which means you’re going to be incredibly sensitive to any and all input tomorrow, and probably for a while until you get used to the new senses. Sound and smell will be the most noticeable, I think, because my understanding is that those human senses are shit. It’s going to be overwhelming.

“You won’t be able to shift at all for a couple days at least, though I’m not a fan of how close we are to the full moon. Still, if you get overwhelmed, _call me_. I will pick you up from school and we’ll figure it out. Okay?”

It took a while to get Scott to agree; he was all up in arms about lacrosse tryouts, of all things. It was too late at night for Laura to try to gently explain the dangers of a new wolf losing control in a public high school, so she settled for snarling at him. Scott squeaked and acquiesced immediately, which was a relief. She has a feeling that Stiles won’t be half so easy to cow, and that he’ll come back from Scott’s with a throat full of questions Laura just doesn’t want to deal with right now, so she takes out the kitchen trash and drags herself back up to bed before he gets back.

Scott’s alpha is insane, feral, and probably wants to kill Laura. Even not knowing who it is, the alpha is a danger: he’ll be able to call Scott to him, to coerce him into killing for him. Laura’s known since she walked the spiral in the clearing that this story probably ends with her killing the rogue alpha. If she does that, traditional pack law says that she becomes Scott’s alpha, and she can’t even begin to imagine that. For so long, it’s just been her and Derek, and the faintest remnants of the dormant bond with Peter. It’s small, and just barely enough to keep her sane and stable, but it’s also all she knows. What the hell will she do with a sixteen-year-old baby bitten wolf? It’s not like Laura can uproot the kid’s life and drag him to Brooklyn to live with her and Derek. For starters, kidnapping a minor across state lines is almost definitely a federal offense. Also, Derek will straight up kill Laura if she brings a puppy home.

Downstairs, Laura hears the front door open and shut, more quietly this time, as Stiles lets himself back in. His footsteps on the stairs are soft and easy, the walk of someone who knows exactly where the floor creaks and avoids it unconsciously. At the top of the stairwell, he softly calls her name, testing to see if she’s awake. Stiles, she decides, determinedly rolling over in bed, is a problem for tomorrow.

Laura has a headache.

The first thing Laura does in the morning is call Derek. If she has to deal with this headache, so does her baby brother.

“The rogue alpha bit someone.”

Derek groans. _“You know, just once, I’d like to start a phone call with you with the word_ hello _.”_

“So say we all, D,” Laura tells him, not allowing the sigh to escape her lips. “But right now, we’ve got bigger problems.”

_“How is a bitten wolf belonging to a crazy alpha our problem?”_ Derek grumbles, emphasizing the _our_ with clear disdain.

“Because it’s Stilinski’s kid’s best friend who got bit,” Laura replies, trying to have patience. It’s hard, on four hours of sleep, thank you Stiles and Scott. “I spent several hours last night dressing the bite and trying to explain _werewolves_ to a couple of idiot sixteen-year-olds.”

_“Christ.”_

“Pretty much, yeah,” Laura agrees, and the sigh finally slips out. “What the hell am I supposed to do with the kid?”

Derek hesitates. _“You really don’t think the alpha can be saved?”_

Laura lets herself think about it, really consider how she might be able to do that. The only tricks she knows are for re-aligning a wolf’s pack loyalties and alpha-ing an omega out of being feral. She thinks of the smell of him in that clearing, the way he’d actually _pissed_ all over the dead animal guts to mark the territory. She’s got nothing in her arsenal that can deal with this.

“I’ll try to reason with him, obviously, when I catch up with him.” It’s a sore spot, actually, how Laura hasn’t been able to find the alpha yet. It’s been nearly a week, and she’s found no scent trail more recent than the one in the clearing. The full moon is only two days out, and it’s driving her up the damn wall. “But I don’t know if he’ll be in the shape to listen.”

_“He’s sane enough to be sending you cryptic emails,”_ Derek points out.

“True. I’ll try, Derek, I really will. I’m just...afraid this is going to escalate, and I want to stop this whole thing in its tracks before someone gets hurt.”

Derek is quiet for a bit, not-talking in that way that he does when he’s building up to something he doesn’t actually want to say. Then, _“Do you want me to fly out there?”_

Laura wants to say _yes_. She wants her brother here so badly it’s a physical ache in her chest, and she can’t imagine Derek feels any better about the thousands of miles between them. Six years of living out of each other’s pockets and now ten days apart — it’s taking its toll. Still, if Laura broke down like that when she first felt the moon-song of _home_ in her blood, she can’t imagine what coming back would do to Derek. She remembers the early weeks after the fire: Derek had been drawn and pale and silent; listless and refusing to eat or sleep until Laura begged and threatened to alpha him into taking care of himself at least a little. For the first month or so, Laura was terrified she was going to lose Derek, too. He walked around like a ghost; like he’d died in the fire with the rest of their family.

She breathes in deep, and lets it out slow. “No. Stay home, I feel better with you not involved with this.” Lie. But Derek can’t hear her heartbeat over the phone, so it doesn't count. “If something changes, I’ll tell you to come, I promise I will. Right now, I want to know you’re safe.”

Derek grumbles a reluctant agreement, trying to hide the relief in his tone, and changes the subject to his current project at the studio. Someone recently suggested he try selling some of his work and, though initially totally bewildered by the idea, he seems to be coming around to it. Laura encourages him, thinks it’ll be good for him to have something that’s his own, a greater sense of independence than the one they’ve cultivated together since the fire. She closes her eyes and listens to him talk, lets him carry the conversation in the way that’s usually Laura’s job, and thinks of home.

It’s impossible.

Laura’s got the evidence right in front of her eyes, filling her senses, but it’s _impossible_. She can’t understand, and she feels blindsided, hollowed out by the revelation that she honestly should have _seen_ , should have _anticipated_. Laura’s a good alpha, for all that her pack is just her and Derek. Her instincts are sharp, her senses sharper, her teeth and claws sharpest of all. They’ve had to be, to keep Derek safe all these years. To protect them on the run; to carve out a place to hide and survive and finally start to _live_ again in New York. She had all the pieces, should have put them together, should have seen this coming. But she hadn’t. Because this?

This is impossible.

When Laura went for her evening jog along the edges of the Preserve earlier tonight, she finally caught the scent of the alpha again, only hours old this time. And thank god for that, because she was starting to get anxious. The full moon is tomorrow, and she was rapidly running out of time to confront this asshole before she had to deal with him truly moon-drunk as well as feral.

The scent trail led deeper into the woods, that awful sick smell again — but more layered, more nuanced, maybe because of its newness. There was a discomfiting smell of disinfectant and sterility, the things that reminded Laura of hospital hallways, overlaying the base scent more strongly than they had in the clearing. For an awful moment, it reminded Laura of the smell in Peter’s room at the assisted living place, blank and clean and so unfamiliar. She dismissed the thought quickly, even as the familiarity of the scent grew the closer she got, and she’s regretting it now.

She can’t understand it, any of it. She’d sat with Peter for hours, talked at him about everything under the sun, and gotten no response. He wasn’t _there_ , not even a little. It’s just not _possible_ for someone to go from catatonic, unresponsive and virtually brain-dead, to _this_ — this looming, grinning, half-feral monstrosity with flaming red eyes and a wild snarl. And yet —

“Peter, it’s me,” Laura gasps out, dodging another blow. “God, _stop_ , Peter, it’s me, it’s Laura!”

The alpha — this rabid, hulking _thing_ that barely resembles a werewolf at all, let alone her uncle — takes a step back, straightening a bit on back legs, though it’s still too hunched to stand upright. He rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck from side to side, a habit of Peter’s during a partial shift that Derek has always echoed. The familiarity of the gesture cuts right to Laura’s core, and she desperately meets his eyes. They’re a dark, glowing red — and god, how the _fuck_ did Peter become an alpha? — and they’re wild, but they’re also terribly, horribly _aware_.

“Oh, I know, Laura,” the alpha — Peter, oh god it really is Peter — snarls. The sound is harsh, warping around oversized canines, but still all too recognizable. “Even if you hadn’t done me the _courtesy,_ ” he sneers, words dripping off his tongue like poison, that sickly-sweet way that Peter’s always had. “Of visiting me so often since you arrived, I like to think I’d be capable of recognizing my dear, sweet niece.”

And he _lunges_.

Laura should be ready: Peter attacked the first moment she caught up to him in the woods, springing from behind a tree and slashing at her hamstrings before she so much as spotted him. Laura had narrowly dodged the swipe and spun around, already shifting and ready to brawl, when the beautiful primal smell of _home_ hit her, too close to ignore anymore, and stopped her shift in its tracks. She recognized the half-shifted features of the wolf before her, and she’s been focused on dodging and trying to talk to Peter, unwilling to hurt him even if he’s bent on hurting her. So she should be prepared when he comes at her again, but she isn’t, and his claws catch her right across her middle. It’s not that deep, though it does rip through her shirt and slice through the upper layers of her skin, but the wound burns in the chilly night air, and Laura stumbles backwards. She forces herself into a partial shift for real this time, raising her clawed hands in defense against her uncle, her blood, her _pack_ — against one of her two surviving family members.

“Peter, _please_ ,” she chokes out, ducking another blow. His arms are too long, disproportionate to his shape, emerging from almost comically hunched shoulders. It’s like he’s trying to go for the full-wolf shift of an alpha, but can’t quite make it. The result is deformed and monstrous, something out of a horror film.

“I don’t want to do this, Laura,” Peter tells her, voice soft even as he circles her like she’s his prey. She follows him, never letting him be at her back. “At the end of the day, we’re still family, you and I. I want you on my side.”

“I’ve always been on your side, Uncle Peter,” Laura tells him. “That’s what pack _means._ ”

He nods, a clumsy movement in the hunched, malformed body; when he stalks in his predatory circle, though, it’s all grace. “I called you, and you came.”

Laura can feel the warmth of blood soaking her shirt front. “The spirals.”

“I’m going after them, Laura,” he tells her, voice low and intimate. With every word, he gets more comfortable talking through the heavy jaw and his voice becomes even more painfully familiar. He used to use this tone for his stupid pranks, drawing his nieces and nephews into elaborate conspiracies just to get one over on another family member. To hear it used like this makes Laura’s stomach roll. “All of them. Every single person responsible for our family’s murder, every single person who let them _get away with it_.”

“You know who they are,” Laura realizes aloud, and halts her counter-circling in surprise. “Peter, who —”

“I need you for this, Laura,” Peter interrupts, cutting off her questions. “I can do this alone, but I don’t want to. You deserve revenge as much as I do, I think.” He tilts his head to the side, observing her in an animalistic sort of way that sends shivers down Laura’s spine. “Between the two of us, we have power, _real_ power. We can make them _pay._ ”

Laura, unconsciously, lets her guard down a bit; Peter seems to be willing to talk. Maybe Derek has the right of it, maybe Laura can _fix this_ without any bloodshed. Please, god, let her be able to fix this without any bloodshed.

“The Sheriff is reopening the case, Peter,” she tells him, slow and solid. “We can get justice, do things right.”

“Do things the _human_ way,” Peter sneers in clear disdain. “No, I don’t think so. Humans killed our pack, Laura. Humans covered it up. Humans closed that case and called it a tragic accident. No, I’m not interested in pursuing any more toothless human justice.”

“What are you going to do?”

He grins, all teeth and malice, and Laura, for the first time tonight, actually begins to be afraid. “I’m going to tear them apart,” he says through his smile. And the joy is genuine, that’s the worst bit. He’s actually thrilled at the prospect. “I’m going to rip them all limb from limb until they choke on blood and their own intestines.”

Laura’s shaking her head in horror, backing away before she even realizes she’s doing it. “No,” she says. “No, Peter, you can’t. We’ll find them, I promise, but you can’t go around committing murder.”

“It’s how the humans solve all their problems,” Peter snarls, the joy abruptly gone. “And besides, Laura dearest, you’re not the boss of me anymore. I know you haven’t paid much attention to your poor, catatonic uncle over the years.” The words are a bitter recrimination, but Laura doesn’t have the space in her right now for the guilt he’s trying to inspire. “But surely you had to notice the pack bond weakening.”

“I thought — I thought that was your health, the distance —” Laura stammers, because she had. Now that she’s looking at it closely, though, she can tell that’s not it. The bond is only an echo of itself, a connection maintained just barely enough that Laura never suspected anything.

“No, I’m a force unto myself now,” Peter continues, and his red eyes flash brighter for a moment. “And I’m afraid that I’m quite determined. And if you’re not with me in this, Laura, well. Then that means you’re in my way.” He tilts his head at her again, and his smile grows into something darker and more vicious.

The fight is awful, and Laura won’t remember much of it later. She knows she gets in a few good hits, but she’s aiming to disable. Within moments it becomes clear that Peter, on the other hand, is aiming to kill.

That in itself is a blow Laura doesn’t know if she’ll ever recover from.

Peter swipes across her stomach again, and this time he cuts her deep, claws hooking under her skin and tearing. His hand comes away bloody and dripping with something more viscous, and Laura very carefully does not think about what that could be. The pain that's strong enough to gray out her vision for a second tells her that Peter's got some of one of Laura's internal organs on his hand. It’s a nasty gut wound, and if she were human it would kill her. As it is, it’s slowing her down more than Laura can afford.

Laura knows that she’s losing, knows that any moment now Peter will come in for the kill, and _still_ she can’t bring herself to raise a hand to harm her uncle. Everything inside of her roars that she should be _protecting_ Peter, not fighting him. She doesn’t even know if she can bring herself to call it a weakness, but it is certainly not proving to be a strength. She’s gearing herself up for a final stand when Peter freezes, claws raised, teeth bared in a bloody snarl. Laura wonders vaguely how much of the blood in his mouth is hers.

And then he turns and runs.

Laura collapses to the ground like a puppet whose strings have been cut, folding to the forest floor and landing in a mess of dead leaves and her own bodily fluids. For a long while, she just lays there, clutching her gut, holding her insides in, and tries to breathe. Peter broke at least two of her ribs, and she's trying to be very, very careful so as not to puncture a lung on one of them. She doesn’t hear them coming, can’t hear much of anything over the sound of her own blood pumping in her ears. Doesn’t smell them until they’re almost on her, her nose clogged with her own blood and basically useless.

He’s only about a hundred yards away when Laura finally hears him, smells him. Heavy boots on dead leaves, the crack of a twig beneath him, the rasp of grasping branches catching on his jacket. And that scent, one she hasn’t smelled in nearly a decade, filling her lungs with frost and woodsmoke and silvery death. Argent is here.

Laura struggles to her feet, stumbling when her foot slides on leaves slick with her own blood. The last thing she needs is to be cornered by hunters when she’s already injured, already trying to heal a gut wound from an alpha. She scrabbles one-handed for purchase on the tree next to her, claws catching on the bark and giving her the leverage to drag herself upright. She's dizzy with blood loss, and even standing this much leaves her lightheaded and throws dark spots across her vision. Now that she’s on alert, Laura can tell that Argent isn’t the only hunter roaming the woods tonight. There are at least three others, all ripe with the smell of wolfsbane and gun oil and malice; but Argent is the closest, the only one walking toward her.

Standing up has left Laura winded, and her legs still are nowhere near steady enough to actually _go_ anywhere by the time Argent comes into visual range. He freezes when he spots her, crossbow held close against his side but not yet aimed in her direction. Laura can barely keep vertical; she definitely can’t flee the scene. She’s left staring, eyes wide, hand still clutching her wounded stomach, terribly aware of just how vulnerable she is right now.

Argent steps closer, cautious but not aggressive. He doesn’t raise the bow. He frowns at her, searching her face for a moment before recognition dawns.

“Hale?” he asks, clearly surprised. Laura wonders if he, too, assumed it was an interloper desecrating her ancestral territory. “What the hell happened?”

“Uncle Peter,” Laura gasps out before she can think better of it. She’s still reeling, hurt and scared and so heartsick she can hardly breathe through it, can’t tell where the treachery ends and her physical injuries begin. “I don’t — Peter’s gone rogue.”

His frown, in the shadows of the moonlit forest, looks almost concerned. He comes closer still, and his grip on the crossbow loosens, like he can tell that she’s not a threat. She'd be resentful of that, if she had the energy.

“Your comatose uncle did this?” She’d be offended by his skepticism if she could start believing it all herself.

She gives a weak, wet laugh. “Not comatose anymore, apparently.”

Further out in the trees, one of the other hunters calls Argent’s name. Neither he nor Laura move, though they both wince a bit at the reminder of other hunters nearby. Laura needs to get out of here.

Her wounds have closed enough that she can trust her insides probably won’t fall out if she tries to run, though her head is still spinning from blood loss and she's not sure how far she can expect to get. But Laura doesn’t want to turn her back on Argent, loose crossbow grip or no. With no real options before her, Laura falls back on being straightforward; she's too wrung out for anything else.

“Are you going to shoot me?” she asks, looking Argent dead in the eye.

To her surprise, he hesitates. He casts a quick glance over his shoulder in the direction the shout had come from, and then turns back to Laura. He gives her a once-over, clearly noting the extent of her injuries, and shakes his head.

“You didn’t do the animal mutilation, did you?” he asks, though he seems to already know the answer. Which is interesting, because Stilinski had said the deer had been found by hikers and taken care of within a few hours. And the clearing, Laura had been on that trail. No one but her had been there in ages, and Scott and Stiles are the only ones besides the Parks folks that would have known where to look. Which must mean...

“Did you get those emails, too?”

Argent looks taken aback, and nods, apparently startled into truthfulness.

Well, that has some interesting implications that Laura really cannot spare the spoons to dissect just yet. When she manages to get someplace safe, manages to close these wounds, manages to find Scott and handle this wonderful new complication of _Peter_ being his goddamn feral alpha — when she's managed all that, then and only then will she wonder about why Peter chose to send the vengeance call out to a member of the Argent clan.

Laura takes a deep breath, and chokes on it a bit. She coughs up some blood and something else nasty that she resolutely refuses to look at too closely, and spits on the ground. Argent makes a noise of alarm, which Laura chooses to ignore.

“Peter,” she manages to croak. “Peter wants revenge for the fire.”

“Where’d he go?” Argent demands, voice sharp.

And the thing is, Laura wants to cling to her family loyalty. Wants tell him to go fuck himself, tell him that she doesn’t answer to hunters, remind him that they’re natural enemies. But she’s still bleeding and she’s fairly certain Peter was less than a minute from the death blow, and frankly that puts Argent and his lowered crossbow ahead of her uncle in her immediate good books. She’ll have time to feel guilty about this later, once the hunters are far, far away from her. So instead Laura looks briefly to the west, eyes on the trail Peter left when he ran from her, when he left her broken and defenseless against the hunters he heard coming before she did.

Argent nods once, then calls to his companions. “I’ve got a trail, heading west!” He spares one last hesitant glance at Laura, then he turns and jogs westward to meet his killer buddies.

When Laura can no longer see him, no longer hear his footsteps, she allows herself a single breath of relief. It's easier now; her ribs are healing. She takes stock of her injuries, of her unsteadiness on her feet, and resigns herself to a full shift. It’ll be easier to make it back on four legs rather than two.

Okay, yeah. Four legs was a bad idea, Laura concludes half an hour later. She’s made it back to the Stilinskis’ and dragged herself up onto the back porch. It’s not a bad position, because it’s out of sight of the street, and neither Stiles nor his dad seem to spend much time in the rooms that look out toward the back of the house. The problem, she realizes only as she collapses heavily onto the worn wooden decking, is that she doesn’t have the energy to change back. She’s stuck there, a huge black wolf, covered in blood and panting heavily on the back porch of near-stranger in the godforsaken Beacon Hills suburbs. And her only pack, the only person she trusts enough to allow near her when she’s this vulnerable, let alone to help patch her up, is three thousand long miles away.

Laura must have been louder than she thought when she fell down, because she can hear Stilinski moving inside. _Fuck_. She looks around, trying to find some place to hide, some place to secret herself away until she can shift back, but there’s nothing. Maybe, if she’s quick, she can get herself under the deck — but Stilinski’s footsteps are quickly approaching the back door. There’s a horrible anxious whining sound in the air, and Laura is horrified to realize it’s coming from her own throat. Hurriedly, she drags herself to her feet and stumbles back toward the deck stairs, but she doesn’t make it. She used the last of her strength just to get this far. Her legs give out from under her and she hits the decking, jogging her almost-healed ribs and causing her to yelp in pain, just as Stilinski opens the door and floods the backyard with light.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he swears, and Laura hears his heartbeat jump almost painfully in his moment of surprise and fear. She whimpers, shuffling on her belly so that she can at least face the Sheriff behind her. If he’s got his gun, if he gets freaked and decides to _use_ it, well. She would like to at least see the bullet coming. Laura’s had enough surprises for one night, thank you.

“Shit,” he hisses, as Laura’s bright red eyes meet his wide human ones. Stilinski has one hand pressed to his chest and one hand — yep, there it is, one hand resting on the gun at his hip. He’s only half in uniform, still in his khaki slacks and his holster complete with all the accessories of law enforcement, but topped with a plain white t-shirt. He smells slightly stale, like the station and the cruiser, so he must have only just gotten off his shift for the night. He worked a mid-shift today, Laura remembers, which puts the time sometime after eleven.

Laura whines, low in the back of her throat, and lays her head on her front paws. She wants to look as non-threatening as wolfishly possible. It seems to work, because Stilinski’s hand slowly drops away from his gun and reaches into his pocket for his cell phone instead. Without breaking eye contact with Laura, he dials.

_“John?”_ A confused, sleepy female voice greets on the other end.

“Hey Melissa, sorry to call so late,” Stilinski starts, but Melissa interrupts.

_“No, don’t worry about it.”_ She sounds wide awake already, like she’s someone who’s used to having to be on high alert the moment she’s woken unexpectedly. _“What’s wrong, what’s happening?”_

“There is a very large wolf on my back porch.” His voice is calm in a way that belies his still-racing heart and the sweat Laura can smell is beginning to prickle his neck and back. “And it is very injured.”

_“Oh my god.”_

“Yes,” he agrees, and breathes in deep. “Do you have Dr. Deaton’s number?”

Laura lets go a half-hearted snarl at that. She doesn’t trust Deaton within a thousand miles of her while she’s injured. She hasn't run into the druid in the week since she got into town, and she wants to keep it that way as long as she can. The Sheriff raises his eyebrows at this reaction, and says again, “Deaton?” Laura growls louder this time, making her displeasure known.

_“Yeah, I heard you the first time. I’m looking, I know Scott’s got it tacked to the refrigerator somewhere…”_

Melissa trails off, but the Sheriff doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to her anymore. Instead, he’s frowning intensely at Laura, who stopped growling when she heard Scott’s name, perking her ears up instead.

“Okay, Mel? I’m about to say something completely insane.” Melissa makes an amused noise at him, but doesn’t say anything. “I seem to have a very _intelligent_ injured wolf on my back porch.”

This does get a response. _“What the hell is that supposed to mean, John?_ ”

“Well, when I mention Deaton,” he pauses, apparently waiting for Laura’s response. She gives it to him, relieved to have some form of communication available, and snarls as best she can. “It gets really agitated. Baring its teeth and snarling at me, the whole shebang.” Laura tries to make her glare judgmental, because really, _shebang_? but she’s not sure if she manages without eyebrows. “But when I mention Scott,” he pauses again, and Laura tries to go for enthusiasm, perking her ears and cocking her head to the side. She wonders for a moment it it would be overkill to wag her tail, then thinks, _to hell with it_ , and does. “Well, it seems to like that name much better.”

_“You’re right, John,”_ Melissa says slowly. _“That does actually sound insane.”_

Laura huffs a little wolfy laugh, which startles Stilinski badly. His heart rate, which had finally been returning to normal, spikes again. Laura idly thinks that Stiles would kill her if he could hear what her presence was doing to his father’s heart.

“Okay, Mel. I’m just gonna ask you to trust me on this one. If it turns out I’m absolutely nuts, you obviously have permission to never let me hear the end of it.”

_“Obviously.”_

“Just, in the meantime, could you grab Scott and his emergency vet kit that I know he made last summer and get over here?”

_“I’m already waking him up,”_ Melissa tells him, and Laura can hear her amusement even through the phone. There’s a beautiful, easy trust between these two that Laura admires. Melissa is ready to go with Stilinski on this one, even if it’s a ridiculous request for what’s probably midnight on a weeknight. Everything about the way they interact screams _family_ , and it’s really no wonder that Scott and Stiles refer to each other as brothers. _“Scott, John needs our help over at their place. They’ve got an injured wolf.”_

Scott’s voice isn’t nearly as clear as Melissa’s, but Laura can still hear him grumble, _“There are no wolves in California.”_

_“Well, there’s at least one. And the Sheriff thinks it might even be smarter than you, so up and at ‘em kiddo. I’ll write you a note so you can be late tomorrow,”_ she adds, in the tone of a bribe.

It works, because Laura can hear rustling sounds on the other end, enough to cover up any further dialogue between Scott and his mom for a bit. The Sheriff is smiling, small but genuine, as he listens, too. He still hasn’t broken eye contact with Laura for longer than a blink. She’s definitely impressed.

_“What the hell kind of question is that?”_ Melissa asks, voice clear again. There’s a pause, probably Scott saying something, and then she sighs. _“My son wants to know what color eyes the wolf has?”_

Stilinski’s smile fades, and he seems to refocus on Laura. “Red,” he says, slow and careful. “They’re red.”

There’s a sound of confusion, then Melissa chastising, _“Language!”_ and then, _“What is that supposed to mean, it better be Laura?”_

Stilinski blinks, taken aback. “Laura?” he asks, disbelieving. “Wait, like Laura Hale?”

Laura takes stock of her situation, of what Stilinski must see. A huge wolf, with unnaturally glowing red eyes, fur matted with blood and too injured to stand, laying in a helpless heap on his back porch. A wolf that holds eye contact, seems to listen to him, and appears even to understand at least parts of the conversation. Yeah, he’s already seen too much. If Laura’s honest with herself, she’s known since he turned on the porch light that it would come to this.

Before Scott was bitten, Laura can’t remember the last time she told someone what she is. She can’t remember the last time she trusted a human enough to say. But she thinks of the overheard conversation between Stilinski and someone at the Sheriff’s Department, the morning after Laura arrived in Beacon Hills. _Claudia wanted to kidnap her and Derek after everything, anyway._

She steels herself for the risk she’s about to take, and then, very carefully, deliberately, Laura nods her head.

“Mel?” Stilinski says, voice faint. “I think the wolf just nodded at me.”

Wolves can’t roll their eyes, or Laura would have. She settles for nodding again, and then laying her head back down on her paws. She’s still dizzy. She’s not healing fast enough.

_“What the hell is going on?”_

“I’ve no idea,” Stilinski says. From the other side of the phone call, Laura hears the slam of doors and the rumble of an engine starting. Melissa bids a hasty farewell, assuring Stilinski that they’ll be here soon.

When his phone is back in his pocket, Stilinski studies Laura closely. Then, slowly, slowly — he takes an unsteady step toward her.

Laura can’t help but shrink back from him a bit. He stops mid-step when he sees this, and holds up his hands as if to show he isn’t a threat.

“Laura?” he asks, voice soft and calm. Then, to himself, “God, this is insane. This is insane. I should not go near the giant wolf that is covered in blood.”

Laura lets slip another wolfy laugh at that. It’s really just a huff of air, but it seems to get the message across. Stilinski glares at her, but there’s no heat to it.

“You can’t blame me,” he says sternly. “Wolves are not supposed to understand human speech as much as you seem to. And wolves are definitely not supposed to nod like they’re trying to agree with me.”

Before Laura can do more than tilt her head to the side at that, trying to figure out a good response, the now-familiar sounds of Stiles come crashing down the stairs inside. He stumbles, still sleep-clumsy, up behind the Sheriff, rubbing his eyes and looking worried.

“What’s happening?” he demands. “Scott called, said Laura was hurt and he’s on his — _Jesus Christ is that a wolf_.”

Ah, he’s seen Laura, then. She gives Stiles her most unimpressed look, and hopes it gets across. His heart is beating a hundred miles a minute, and it’s weirdly satisfying. The thing about Stiles is that, despite being an only child, he exudes Little Brother Energy, and Laura can’t help but treat him as such. She snorts and shakes her head at him, as if to say, _no shit, Sherlock_.

“That is exactly what I’m trying to figure out, son,” Stilinski says wearily. He seems to have grown accustomed to Laura’s presence on his deck, at least, because he’s turning to look at his kid even as Stiles comes out of the house and steps just in front of him. Because Stiles has no sense of self-preservation, he takes another creeping step forward toward Laura. She manages to keep herself from growling or flinching back this time.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says quietly, taking in the sheer amount of mud and blood Laura’s gotten all over the back porch. He crouches down, sitting on his heels about a foot away from Laura, and meets her eyes. He’s barefoot, wearing only plaid boxers that reveal skinny, hairy legs, and that stupid lacrosse hoodie. In the light of the porch lamp, Laura can see the shape of him, the softness usually concealed by layers upon layers during the day. In his surprise and apparent awe, he’s forgotten to hunch and hide himself away. “Laura?” he asks, disbelieving.

Laura nods, slow and deliberate.

_“Fuck,_ ” Stiles whispers, and reaches a hesitant hand toward her.

“Son, I don’t know if that’s a good idea…” Stilinski starts, but he trails off when Laura pushes her face toward Stiles’s hand. She nudges her cold, wet nose against long fingers, which, after only a moment’s hesitation, Stiles then buries in the fur behind her ears.

“What the hell happened?” Stiles murmurs, though it’s clear he doesn’t actually expect an answer. Without touching any other part of her, he examines the poor shape she’s in and frowns deeply. “You’re pretty badly hurt. Are you not healing?” He does look her in the eye this time, and waits for an indication in either direction. Laura does her best imitation of a shrug. Stiles’s frown deepens. “You can’t shift back, can you?”

Laura shakes her head at that, because it’s less complicated than the healing question. She runs a quick mental check and, yep, still too drained to shift. Fuck.

“Stiles,” Stilinski says, slow and cautious. It’s the same voice he used earlier, when he first realized that Laura wasn’t a normal wolf. Laura can smell his fear, the stress he’s exuding watching his son gently pet a giant, supernatural predator. “Care to explain to me what, exactly, is happening here?”

Stiles bites his lip, and searches Laura’s face for something. What, some kind of permission, maybe? Laura thinks about how to give it, but then she hears the car coming up the road and stills completely under Stiles’s hand.

“What?” Stiles asks, suddenly on high alert. “What is it, what’s happening?”

The McCalls must have the windows rolled down, because Laura can smell Scott on the wind before the car pulls into the Stilinskis’ drive. She can’t stop the long, low sound that comes from her then, something between relief and a whimper and the instinctive desire to howl to signal for help. Stiles’s hand tightens in her fur.

“Laura?” Scott calls, and then he’s there, rounding the corner of the house faster than a human ought to be able, carrying a large gym bag that smells like first aid stuff. He spots them immediately — they’re kind of hard to miss, and Laura can’t imagine the ridiculous picture they make — and stops. His nostrils flare briefly, scenting the air, and Laura’s a little proud of the way he only relaxes and finishes his approach when he recognizes her scent. It was basically the first thing she taught him earlier this week, and she's pleased to see the lessons are sticking. Scott drops to the ground next to Laura and Stiles and opens his kit. As he pulls on a pair of gloves, his mother appears in Laura’s line of sight, confused and out of breath. It takes everything in Laura to not draw back and growl at the unfamiliar presence, but she manages.

Melissa curses under her breath when she sees Laura, but to her credit she barely falters in her step. Very, very carefully, she steps around them onto the porch, backing up until she’s next to Stilinski by the door.

Stilinski clears his throat. “Stiles? Scott?”

Stiles and Scott look at each other, then at Laura, and back to each other. There’s that natural familial nonverbal communication they have going, and then Scott nods and turns back to his task, leaving Stiles to deal with explanations.

“So, uh, let’s do the longer version of this once Scott gets Laura patched up and she gets enough strength back to look human-shaped again.” Stilinski mouths _human-shaped?_ in clear disbelief, but Stiles bowls onward. “Mostly because I definitely do not know enough to answer all your questions, and also because it’s definitely not my story to tell. But the short version is, werewolves! They’re a thing.”

Melissa and the Sheriff share a glance, and Laura’s impressed to see that their nonverbal communication skills are at least on par with their sons’. Melissa groans and drops her head onto Stilinski’s shoulder. “What the hell have you two gotten into?”

It takes nearly two hours for Laura to recover enough to be able to shift back. She hates that, hates the vulnerability of being stuck in one shape. When Scott’s got the worst of her bandaged, he and Stiles tag-team to carry her into the house and lay her down on a towel in the den. Stilinski and Melissa watch from the hall, clearly unnerved but at least trusting their kids with this for the moment. Everyone is quiet and awkward while they wait, until Stiles decides that midnight werewolf adventures, as he’s decided to call this, warrant pancakes. And then he makes pancakes. His bright, determined chatter is enough to let some of the tension out of the room, and Laura is absurdly grateful. When she feels her strength returning, she quietly gets to her feet and limps toward the stairs. Everyone is, at this point, so occupied with their own conversations in the kitchen that no one notices Laura’s moved until she comes back downstairs, on two feet again and dressed in fresh clothes. She’ll need to go back to the woods for her jacket, but the other things were ruined anyway. Hazards of being a werewolf.

“Thank you, Scott,” is the first thing Laura says as she walks into the bright light of the kitchen. Her voice is raspy, throat still sore from coughing up her own blood. Her insides mostly seem healed up, though, and the wound on her stomach, the really bad one, looks days old now and has finally stopped bleeding.

Everyone looks up at her, startled by her presence. The Sheriff and Melissa both watch her with wide eyes; it’s pretty clear that, until this moment, they hadn’t _really_ believed that the injured wolf was Laura.

Scott frowns. “Of course,” he says, in a tone that suggests anyone would have done as he did. Laura aches with the sweetness of that optimism, that belief in other people. “Are you finally healing right?”

She nods. “Yeah. I should be good by tomorrow night.”

“That was a pretty serious injury,” Stilinski says, apparently recovered from his shock. His voice is skeptical as he continues. “You’re telling me it’ll be healed by tomorrow?”

Laura shrugs, then lifts her shirt partway. The long lines left by Peter’s claws are red and angry across the whole width of her abdomen, the skin around them pink and puffy. Still, they’re a far sight better than a few hours ago, when Laura was actually holding her insides in with one hand. She watches the expressions of the four people at the table carefully, then drops her shirt back down.

Melissa inhales sharply. She looks pale in the yellow kitchen light, uncertain of the world around her. Still, she looks Laura in the eye and asks, “Do you need that rebandaged? I’m a nurse, so I can help now that you’re…” She hesitates, then helplessly makes a sort of all-encompassing gesture. “Bipedal.”

Stiles snorts in amusement, and Scott glares at him.

God, the McCalls are actually saints, aren’t they? “No, thank you.” Laura tells her. “I just needed the bandage until the wounds closed. It should heal pretty fast now. Perks of being a werewolf,” she adds, because someone’s got to name the elephant in the room.

“Yeah,” says Stilinski. “About that.” He’s got a cup of coffee, which Laura narrows her eyes at, because she’d somehow missed the smell of that being made. Stilinski catches her look and rolls his eyes. “Coffee’s on the counter. I figured we probably weren’t getting much more sleep tonight. Get yourself a mug, then sit. You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

Laura’s grateful for the slight smile, for the casual joke. It’s a deliberate indication that he’s not angry, only worried and curious, and Laura is just _so damn grateful_ for that. She nods and heads for the coffee. The awkward silence is back, though the tension isn’t nearly as bad as it was when she was still bleeding everywhere. Small blessings, Laura supposes.

She sits down, settling between Scott and the Sheriff, because she needs to feel the comfort of another wolf at her side right now. Her brother would be ideal, but Scotty will do. Laura takes a sip of bitter black coffee, closes her eyes, and breathes. She opens her eyes, looks at each of them in turn, and says, “So. Werewolves.”

“They’re a thing,” Stilinski says, repeating Stiles’s earlier turn of phrase.

“Yep,” Laura confirms. “And I, obviously, am one. Scott and Stiles knew about me already, which is why Scott asked about eye color.” She flashes her eyes briefly red, which causes Stilinski’s breath to catch and Melissa’s heart to skip a beat. “Red eyes mean an alpha werewolf, a pack leader. Scott knows that normal wolves don’t live in the area, but that there are two alpha werewolves in Beacon Hills right now.”

“Two?” Melissa asks, and that’s fear rolling off of her now. Laura’s got to nip that in the bud, but she's not really sure how.

“Did the other alpha do that to you?” Scott asks, eyes wide.

Laura nods. “That’s why it didn’t heal as fast,” she explains. “Werewolves heal quickly, even from wounds that might be fatal to humans. Injuries inflicted by an alpha werewolf are more difficult to heal, which is still true for other alphas, like me. It would have been worse if the alpha who attacked me had a pack,” she says, and darts a glance at Scott, who swallows. “My pack is small, but it’s stable, which gives me more strength. It’s easier for me to heal and conserve energy when I’m fully shifted, which is why you found me like that on the back porch.” She turns to Stilinski and winces in apology. “I’m sorry about that, by the way. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got back here and couldn’t change back.”

Stilinski raises his eyebrows at her. “Not really sure you need to apologize for being hurt,” he says slowly. “Though I would like to know what two — two alpha werewolves are fighting over in my town. This some kind of territory war or something?”

Laura can’t stop herself in time: she snarls a little, baring teeth that are far sharper than they ought to be. In her bones, the home-song of Beacon Hills is thrilling with challenge at the very idea. Everyone’s heartbeats jump at her expression, though, and Laura quickly gathers herself. “Sorry. Sorry, instinct. I usually have better control,” she adds, frustrated. “But I’m...I’m really wiped out right now.” Laura closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and tries again. “No. Beacon Hills is my territory, even though I’ve not been here for years. This place...it belongs to my family, and my family belongs to it. It’s really hard to explain to someone who can’t _feel_ it.” Laura runs a hand through her hair, grimacing when her fingers catch on some kind of forest detritus.

“Your whole family are werewolves,” Stiles says, slow, like he’s piecing something together. He studies Laura’s face carefully as she answers.

“Yes. Well, mostly.” She swallows the rising grief and explains, “My older brother was human, and one of my cousins. But yeah, as a general rule as far as the Hales go, it’s werewolves all the way down.”

Stilinski looks like he’s going to need a lot of time to process this statement. Laura can practically hear the gears turning in his head as he relives every interaction he’d had with her family before the fire. His son, however, just nods, easily incorporating this into his worldview, and comes to his next conclusion.

“That’s why someone killed them all, isn’t it?” he asks. He’s not gentle about it; Laura’s not sure Stiles has it in him to be gentle around other people’s trauma. “Someone knew what you guys were, and they killed you. That’s why you think someone’s still after you and Derek.”

Laura nods, and then has to close her eyes against the pain of this conversation for a moment. Stiles, because he has no respect for the feelings of others, keeps pushing. “Is that a thing? Like, are werewolf hunters an actual thing? Are we gonna find ourselves on the wrong side of the Winchesters?”

Scott’s voice is a little panicked as he speaks up for the first time. “Dude, I’m way too young to be killed by the Winchesters!”

“Why would werewolf hunters be after you, Scott?” Melissa asks sharply. The acrid smell of fear rises sharply from where she sits, across the table from Laura.

Laura opens her eyes to see Scott and Stiles both looking at her with wide, panicked eyes. It’s all Laura can do not to roll her eyes back at them. Then she turns to Melissa. “Because the same alpha that fucked me up tonight bit him a couple nights ago.”

“Meaning…?” Melissa’s rising alarm is doing nothing for the tension in Scott next to Laura. He’s stock-still, braced for something, like he expects to be hurt or punished. Laura _hates_ that.

“Meaning, your son is a werewolf now,” Laura tells Melissa, voice calm but firm. “And we can have a conversation about what that means, and how it will affect his life, and the ways to handle the changes. Right now, I need to focus on what happened tonight and the consequences that are coming because of it.” She pauses and gives Melissa a little smile, trying to soften the blow. “Besides, I’d like to have that conversation once all of us have gotten a decent night’s sleep under our belts, yeah?”

Melissa’s lips thin, and she looks back at Scott. Scott is still tense beside Laura, and she realizes suddenly that she can _feel_ his anxiety, his fear of rejection — feel it, not just sense it. She makes the active decision to focus on the immediate concern, which is _fucking Peter_ , and deal with this unintentional pack bond in its infancy some time Not Now.

Derek is going to straight up murder her. Oh, well.

Laura takes a deep breath a la her Ohio therapist, centers herself, and dives into what needs to be said before they sidetrack to anything else. “My Uncle Peter is the other alpha.” Stunned silence all around. Laura sips at her coffee, letting it ground her in this present moment. “He killed those deer, mutilated the corpses, sent me the quasi-threatening emails.”

“How?” Stilinski asks, utterly bewildered. Join the club, Laura thinks darkly.

“I have no idea,” she tells him. She thinks of the muted scent of Peter in his wheelchair, utterly unmoving and unbearably absent. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself.” Absently, she puts a hand to her abdomen over the place where Peter tried to disembowel her. “He wants revenge for the fire, and he’s somehow managed to get the power of an alpha — that's a pack leader, like I said, the strongest kind of wolf. He used to be one of my betas.” God, there’s so much to explain, so much background knowledge that Laura just takes for granted. She needs a powerpoint, she thinks, something like a Werewolves 101 to give people so that she can focus on the actual life-threatening shit.

“Dude, there needs to be like, Werewolves 101: Introduction to Lunacy or something,” Stiles says, apparently on Laura’s wavelength. Interesting. Laura can definitely take advantage of this.

Scott nods seriously next to him. “It’s kinda a lot,” he agrees morosely. Which, fair. Scott’s going through some shit right now; Laura has the capacity to at least acknowledge that much.

“Tell you what, Stiles,” Laura says, her tone one of cheerful generosity. “How about you put together a syllabus and I answer questions for you, and then we can make, like, a pamphlet.”

Stiles narrows his eyes at her. “I want to enthusiastically agree, because that does sound pretty awesome. But I also get the sense that you’re pawning something annoying off on me, and I want it known that I resent that.”

Laura shrugs. “Consider it noted. My point is,” she says, continuing where she’d left off. “Peter is somehow healed, more powerful than he ought to be, and hell-bent on going on a vengeance-driven murderous rampage. Also,” she adds bitterly. “He gutted me and left me to goddamn hunters, to whom he also apparently sent cryptic revenge emails.”

“There are hunters here, now?” Stilinski demands, voice sharp. Melissa looks between Laura and Scott, clearly terrified for her son. “The same ones that murdered your family?”

An excellent question, Laura thinks. She can’t imagine any other reason why Peter would call the goddamn Argents, of all people, here if they weren’t somehow responsible for the fire. At the same time, Laura _knows_ Chris Argent’s scent. She would know it in grief, in madness, in death. That’s the whole point of the true mates bullshit, even if it’s largely useless at best and horribly ironic with a side of fatal at worst in Laura’s own case. She would have noticed if he’d been anywhere near Beacon Hills around the time of the fire. Besides, the Argents have their Code, and they take a lot of pride in upholding it.

“I don’t know,” Laura answers at last. “The hunter I spoke with tonight, he said he got the same animal mutilation photos I did, but I know he wasn’t involved in the fire. I’ve met him before,” she explains, when the Sheriff responds with raised eyebrows. “I would have known his scent if he’d been in town around that time.” When it looks like he wants to press, Laura raises a hand and heads that off. “It’s a really long story, but suffice it to say, I was always going to be the Hale alpha after my mother died. I was taught how to navigate relationships with other werewolf packs and with the less insane hunter families. The Argent family has a code: We hunt those who hunt us. They live by it pretty religiously, and at the very least he wouldn’t break it by burning down a house with human children inside.”

Stilinski goes ashen at the reminder of everything Laura lost, and Melissa puts a hand over her mouth in horror.

“My best guess is that Peter wants Argent here as part of a larger trap for the people responsible for the fire. That, or he’s decided that every hunter in existence is responsible for the fire. Which, possible, given what seems to be left of his mental faculties.” Laura sighs and resists the urge to wish Peter luck in that endeavor. A world without hunters would be...yeah, that’d be nice, she thinks. “Either way, the next trick up my uncle’s sleeve is definitely murder.”

And that would be enough to deal with on its own, but Scott chooses this moment to further complicate things, because that seems to be Scott’s designated role in Laura’s life.

“Wait, Argent? Like, Allison Argent?”

Stiles drops his head to the table with an audible _thunk_ and groans.

“Who’s Allison?” Laura asks, aiming for patience. Because she’s pretty sure the presence of multiple unrelated Argents is so unlikely as to be impossible.

“She’s the new girl at school,” Scott says, brown eyes wide and earnest. “I’ve got a date with her tomorrow night.”

They all sit in silence, staring at Scott, for a long while before Laura breaks.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is a Werewolves 101 powerpoint in the works, and I fully intend to link it at the end of the fic.


	4. chapter three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Derek comes on scene and a pack begins to form

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally just forgot this week, but here's a chapter now! tomorrow I'll be posting a brief interlude, but then I'll be back on my usual wednesday schedule from there.
> 
> you will find that I made some executive decisions on what pack looks like and how pack bonds function. it'll all be fleshed out further in context as the story moves along, but seriously the show had _so much potential_ to work with and completely shat the bed.
> 
> chapter-level warnings: second-hand description of a mild panic attack. I think that's it. no one even bleeds!

Derek wakes in the morning to three missed calls from Laura, an email informing him of his itinerary for a flight to California later today, and the distinct feeling of a new pack bond tugging at the back of his mind.

He immediately wishes he were still asleep.

Instead, he groans and gets out of bed, stumbling to the kitchen and deciding that he will, at least, give himself the luxury of coffee before he deals with whatever the hell Laura has done now. She hasn’t left any voicemails, so Derek occupies himself with the flight information while the coffee maker does its thing. Luckily, his flight isn’t until around two this afternoon, so he has time to pack and tie things up here before he heads west, because god knows how long he’ll be out there. He’ll need to get someone to watch the house, at the very least to water Laura’s completely unnecessary jungle of houseplants. He can probably get Ward to do it, just promise him infinite lattes or something in return. Derek focuses on possible bribes and tries to ignore the cold, sinking feeling in his middle that comes part and parcel with the thought of going back to Beacon Hills. Derek also very carefully ignores the probably terrible implications of the flight, given that Laura had told him to stay home just the other day.

Only when he’s finished one cup of coffee and poured himself another does Derek call Laura back. Frankly, the wait is the very least she deserves, since he knows she’s about to put him through some bullshit.

When she picks up, he doesn’t give her a chance to say hello. “You adopted the idiot sixteen-year-old,” he accuses. The connection is faint and new, but it’s definitely there, and Derek’s more than a little upset that she hadn’t even asked before she did this to them both. He doesn’t like strangers as a general rule; he likes it less when they’re in his head.

 _“Yeah, didn’t mean to do that,”_ Laura says. To her credit, she sounds properly chagrined. Derek doesn’t much care.

“How can you add someone to our pack without _meaning to_?”

Laura makes one of her annoyed little huffs, like _Derek_ is being the unreasonable one here. He isn’t. He is confident that he is very much being reasonable right now.

 _“I got hurt last night,”_ Laura says shortly. _“Pretty bad. I had to do a full shift just to get back to the Stilinskis’ place, and when I got there I couldn’t change back.”_

Derek’s blood runs cold. The thought of Laura, alone and hurt and without her pack, without _him_ , is one of his worst nightmares. She continues on, like this news alone isn’t devastating.

 _“Scott patched me up. I’m not sure exactly how it happened from there, but that seems to have been enough to transfer his loyalties to me.”_ She pauses and takes a deep breath, and then tries to reassure Derek. _“I wouldn’t have done it on purpose, not without talking to you first. I think some things are just older than ritual, than what we’ve been taught.”_

Derek sighs, because he knows she’s right. And besides, there’s a more important matter to address now. “What happened? Were you attacked?”

 _“The rogue alpha. I finally caught up to him.”_ Laura hesitates in a way that she never does with Derek. With him, she’s bossy and bitchy and says exactly what’s on her mind, so Derek knows he’s not going to like what she says even before her voice goes quiet and shaky. _“It was Peter.”_

Derek’s brain goes blank. “What?”

_“The alpha, the one who sent the revenge spirals. The one who turned Scott, attacked me. It’s Peter, Derek.”_

“But Peter’s not an alpha,” Derek says dumbly. “Peter’s —” Derek reaches for the place in the pack bond where Peter lives. He’s grown fainter and fainter these last few years, with the distance and with Peter himself being in what basically amounts to a vegetative state. But now he’s not there at all. Not like he’s died, not like when all those lights inside Derek went out when he killed his whole family, but like he’s just...slipped away in the night. He feels like his heart is going numb. All that's left is a hollow, echoing feeling. “Peter’s not pack anymore.”

 _“I don’t know how it happened,”_ Laura says, and she sounds like she’s choking back tears. Christ, it’s been years since Derek’s seen Laura cry. He can’t handle it now, doesn’t remember how. _“I just — he didn’t even smell like himself until he was right in front of me, half-shifted and lashing out. And even then, he mostly still just smelled_ wrong. _”_

“Why did he attack you? Is he still unconscious or something? Did he know it was you?” He can’t have, Derek thinks wildly. Uncle Peter’s an asshole, but he wouldn’t attack Laura, wouldn’t try to hurt his _alpha_.

But Laura lets out a little sob, and Derek knows he’s wrong. _“He did. He knew it was me, and he tried to kill me.”_ She pauses to take a few shaking, watery breaths before she continues. _“He’s going after everyone he thinks is responsible for the fire. Like, full-on murder spree, from what he was saying.”_

Derek wonders, the thought cold and distant, how much Peter knows about the fire. Wonders if he’s on Peter’s kill list, and how far down; wonders when Peter will come after him.

At least Derek will have it coming, unlike Laura.

“I saw the flight booking,” he says when it becomes clear that Laura can’t manage anything else at the moment. “You’ll pick me up at Oakland?”

She takes another deep, shuddering breath. _“Yeah. Stilinski says we can stay with him as long as we need, though we’ll need to share the guest room. I figure we can talk about a hotel or something once you get here.”_ She pauses, and in the background Derek can hear a quiet male voice, though he doesn’t quite catch the words. Laura gives a strangled little laugh and says to Derek, _“Oh yeah. Stilinski and his kid know we’re werewolves now.”_

Derek only barely resists the urge to hang up on her. Today is the worst.

When he touches down in California that night, Derek feels like he’s about to burst from his skin. He hates flying, _hates_ it. Most wolves do, which is why Laura did a crazy four-day cross-country road trip instead of flying out herself. The air in the airport is recycled and stale, and worse again in the plane. Add in the smell of hundreds and thousands of strangers in too-close proximity, the nauseating overlapping smells of a dozen food courts, and it just compounds. And the noise, god, the noise is the worst, even with the noise-cancelling headphones Derek got himself a couple years back. It takes everything in him not to just wolf out and bulldoze his way through the crowd and out the door.

He barely makes it out onto the sidewalk before Laura is on him, flinging her entire self at Derek. It’s the most aggressive kind of hug, and a human would probably be bowled over by the force of his giant of a sister slamming into them. Derek, however, is used to this sort of ambush, and braced himself without even realizing it. He buries his nose in Laura’s hair, breathing in deep the smell of home and sister and pack, filling his lungs til they ache. He’s missed her. God, he’s missed her. And maybe there’s an element of codependence there, but he honestly cannot give a damn.

“Hey, Lo,” he murmurs. Laura clutches him even more tightly, and Derek thinks he can actually feel his ribs creak with the pressure. She, too, is gulping great lungfuls of pack scent, her nose pressed to the pulse point on his throat in an attempt to get past the stench of airport. They stand there for what is probably too long, until Laura finally pulls away and straightens up.

Smiling down at Derek, she claps him once on the back and says, “Let’s go, Der Bear. It’s an entire fucking shitshow back home.”

So Scott can feel Laura in the back of his head now. That’s a thing that’s happening to him. More than that, he can feel Derek, someone he’s never met, the moment his plane lands in California. It’s weird and it’s unsettling, and Laura can talk about the advantages of “pack bonds” all she wants, but that still doesn’t help Scott get around the fact that he can _feel other people in his head_.

He’s trying to explain it to Stiles, who is sprawled on Scott’s bed and messing around on his phone while Scott tries to find something to wear to the party tonight. Laura had made a comment, just before she left to go pick up Derek, about how Scott should really stay home for his first full moon, but he’s decided that she’s overreacting. He feels fine.

He feels great, actually. Full of energy and like he might burst out of his skin with how much he’s looking forward to tonight. God, he still can’t believe Allison wants to go out with him.

“Scott, buddy?” Stiles asks, interrupting Scott’s train of thought. “You kinda trailed off in the middle of a sentence on me there. What happened?”

“Oh.” He had, hadn’t he. He turns and grins at Stiles sheepishly. “Just thinking about Allison.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “You’re ridiculous. I’m inclined to side with Laura and tell you to just stay home, just to make you stop with that stupid sappy face.”

Scott picks a pair of balled-up socks off the floor and chucks them at Stiles’s head. He grins when they hit their target, because werewolf coordination? Never gonna get old.

“Shut up,” he tells Stiles, grinning wider as Stiles splutters his horror about Scott’s dirty socks. “You’re just jealous because I made first line, and have a date with a hot girl, and somehow everything in my life is going _right_.”

“Granted,” Stiles says, suddenly sober. “Said hot girl probably is part of a family that is dedicated to, you know, killing werewolves. Which, if you’ll remember, you are. You are definitely part of that category now.”

Scott shrugs this off. “Yeah, but Laura says the Argents don’t kill people for no reason. Besides,” and can he help it if he goes all dreamy-eyed again? “Allison’s not a murderer.”

Stiles makes one of his little noises that could be agreement, but is probably skepticism instead. Scott, in his endless generosity, elects to ignore this. He’s finally found something half-decent to wear, and he starts changing while he keeps talking.

“I don’t really get what the big deal about the full moon is, anyway,” he muses, pulling the fresh shirt over his head. Laura had talked a lot about loss of control, and about emotional instability, but Scott really doesn’t feel anything like that. Yeah, he’s been amped up all day, but he’s pretty sure that’s just because he _has a date with Allison, holy shit_. Shimmying out of his jeans, he continues, “I mean, my senses feel sharper, I guess? The whole world feels, I dunno, more real somehow.”

Stiles squinches his nose up at this, admittedly, incredibly vague description and studies Scott. “Well, we’ve already seen how super intense emotions — like lacrosse — can force you to at least partially shift.”

“Lacrosse isn’t an emotion, Stiles.”

“Isn’t it, though? Anyway, not the point,” Stiles says firmly before Scott can lead him into an argument along this tangent. “The point is, maybe the moon phases just heighten all that. Like, you’ll be more sensitive to strong emotions, and more likely to lose control over the change. And don’t argue with me on this one, buddy, but Allison is a strong emotion where you are concerned.” He pauses, then adds, too-casual, “Also, this is when your bloodlust will be at its peak.”

“I’m sorry, my what?”

“Your urge to kill, Scott! Like, you do realize that there are horror stories about werewolves for a reason, right? It’s your first full moon. We don’t know what might set you off and send you into some kind of, of killing frenzy!”

Scott pretends to think about this for a moment, but not too hard. Stiles is being ridiculous. “You know,” he says. “I think I am definitely experiencing an urge to kill…”

Stiles flails his alarm. “See! This is what I’m talking about, Scott!”

“The urge to kill my best friend who is _seriously_ raining on my parade, dude.”

Stiles glares, then proceeds to grumble inarticulately and scrub a hand over his hair. “I’m just saying, what if you do lose control tonight? Like, I dunno, Allison kisses you and your heartbeat skyrockets and then you change into whatever fluffy beast you’re going to become. What then?”

Scott brightens. “You think Allison might kiss me?”

Stiles groans and flops backward onto Scott’s bed. “We’re all going to die.”

Scott rolls his eyes. Stiles is always so dramatic.

A few hours later, Scott is kind of feeling like maybe, just maybe, Stiles might’ve been right. Just this once.

The party is crowded, the noise and the clashing smells loud in Scott’s newly enhanced senses, but it’s just the right kind of overwhelming at first. The chlorine of the pool and the sharp sting of alcohol combined with the chemical-sugar scent of soda (and god, Scott is kinda grossed out by the way most soda smells and tastes with werewolf senses); the layers upon layers of deodorants and colognes and perfumes, not to mention hairspray and sweat and just the smell of _people_ , individuals with unique scent prints, something Scott isn’t used to yet. All of it threaded through with hormones and pheromones and whatever the hell else it is that people sweat out when they’re feeling. Laura’s promised to teach it all to him in time, but right now it’s just a mostly-meaningless soup of people-smell. The music and the laughter and the occasional sound of breaking glass or clumsy tripping and crashing are so much, but somehow _good_ , somehow a song in Scott’s blood that only amplifies that feeling of the world being more real than ever before.

And above it all is _Allison_. To Scott, the loudest sound in the cacophony of the party is the steady beat of Allison’s heart, a percussion sweeter than any music he’s ever heard. As they dance and she pulls him closer, he imagines he can feel his own heart trying to match hers, like all of him wants to be a part of her. And her smell, god. She smells like flowers and something like coconut in her shampoo, and like the cold night air and somehow, distantly like the sea. Allison smells like freedom, like happiness, and honestly screw alcohol and the full moon, Scott is drunk on _Allison_.

He hadn’t known it was possible to feel like this.

Of course, then the full moon comes up, drifts out from behind some clouds, and everything goes to shit.

Laura can feel Scott’s panic along the new and fragile pack bond seconds before her phone starts to ring. She knows this is going to be stupid before she answers.

“Scott,” she says in greeting. Derek looks over from the passenger seat, where he’s been clutching his bag with white knuckles and claws since they crossed the territory line a few minutes back. He’s reacting better than Laura had, though she’s worried about how pale he is in the moonlight.

 _“Laura, I think I messed up,”_ Scott gasps into her ear. He definitely has — Laura can hear that he’s talking around a mouthful of fangs, yes, but more importantly she can hear the sounds of a party in the background.

The goddamn hubris of teenagers.

“Where are you?” Laura demands. She doesn’t bother with useless clarifications of _how_ , exactly, Scott’s messed up. There’s time for that later.

 _“Uh, Maple Street? Somewhere?”_ His breath is coming too fast, and Laura needs to get him to calm. _“I can’t remember the address! I’m by my car, but I can’t, I can’t_ think —”

“Scott,” she interrupts his spiraling. “Listen to me. Remember what I told you about what to do if your senses get overwhelming? Pick one thing, any one thing, and focus on that. One smell, one sound, okay?”

_“Uh-huh…”_

“What’ve you got, Scott?” Laura prompts when there’s nothing more forthcoming.

 _“Allison,”_ he says, and he finally sounds like he’s got a full breath of air. _“I’ve got Allison’s heartbeat. I can hear her.”_

Laura and Derek exchange a worried glance at that. With all the noise in the background, it doesn’t seem like it should be possible for Scott to pick up a single heartbeat. A horrible suspicion begins to form in Laura’s mind, but she immediately pushes it to the side. That’s a problem for later. Instead, she takes a deep breath of her own and tells Scott, “Good, that’s good. Okay, focus on her heartbeat. Breathe in time with it, okay? Put your face on your knees or inside your jacket, something that smells like you. That will help block out everything else.”

_“Okay.”_

“I’ve got Derek and we’re on our way, okay, Scott? We’re gonna be there in just a few minutes.”

 _“Okay. Okay.”_ Deep breath. _“Thanks, Laura.”_

Laura hangs up, tosses the phone to Derek. “Text Stiles,” she instructs. “Get the exact address. I’ll just start heading for that part of town.”

Derek frowns even as he does what he’s told. “Is the kid’s name really _Stiles Stilinski_?”

Laura snorts a laugh, because she’s been constantly entertained by this very thing for days now. “Oh, yeah,” she tells him, unable to keep the glee from her voice. “Best bit? He chose it himself. Says his legal name is a nightmare, and also Polish.” She pauses, thoughtful for a moment. “Although come to think of it, I’m not sure if those two things are related. Like, is it a nightmare because it’s Polish, or also other reasons?”

She knows Derek is rolling his eyes. She valiantly resists the urge to punch him over the gear shift, and instead chooses to around a corner in the way that she knows makes him carsick.

“The address is 2213 Maple,” he tells her, and she knows he’s glowering. “Also, you’re the worst and I didn’t miss you at all.”

Laura grins and puts the pedal to the metal.

Maple Street is crowded with cars, and Laura and Derek can hear the music from like eight blocks away. They need to get Scott out of here, and fast, before the Sheriff’s office gets a call with a noise complaint and everything gets more complicated. Laura slows as she closes in on the party, pulling to a stop when she spots Melissa’s car. She throws the car into park, turns on the emergency flashers (as always, she thinks briefly of Philip, who’d referred to them as _park anywhere lights_ ), and jumps from the car. She finds Scott on the other side, sitting on the ground with his back against his mother’s car and his face pressed to his knees, just like Laura told him.

With a girl sitting next to him, holding his hand and looking very, very worried.

She smells like Chris. Not in the base smell, the part that’s mostly genetics; no, she smells like they live in close proximity, like they’re part of each other’s orbit. The smell of him is ground into her skin, and Laura has to suppress an ache in her chest. This must be his daughter. This is Scott's Allison Argent.

“Hey, Scott,” Laura says, voice quiet and gentle as she approaches.

Allison looks up with wide, fearful eyes. “He’s not talking,” she says, her voice pitched high with fear. “We were dancing, and then he just ran out, and he, he lets me hold his hand but he won’t tell me what’s wrong!”

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Laura soothes. Experience tells her that her version of the Alpha Voice is about 80% likely to work on humans, so she keeps it up as she crouches next to the teens. “Scott’s having a bit of a panic attack. He might not be able to talk right now. He managed to call me, and I’m here to see if he needs a ride home.” Laura looks at where Allison clutches one of Scott’s hands in both of hers. Scott’s knuckles are pale, and his grip on Allison’s fingers can’t possibly be comfortable for the girl; but his hands look entirely human, and his nails are short and blunt. “Hey, Scott, can you look up at me?”

Scott nods into his knees, then slowly raises his face to Laura’s. His jaw is clenched tight, and his sideburns are definitely thicker than they ought to be, but the only real nod to the full moon above them is his eyes, which keep flashing gold.

“Do you want to go home?” Laura asks him, in a tone that should tell him that actually, he doesn’t have much choice about it. Thankfully, Scott nods. “Cool. Allison, did Scott give you a ride here?”

The girl nods, clearly relieved at someone else handling the situation. “Yeah, but I can probably call my dad. My mom’s out of town for the weekend, but my dad should be home.”

Yeah, somehow Laura doubts that. Her money is on Argent being in the Preserve, hunting for Peter on the full moon. Laura should probably be out there, too, because who knows what the hell Peter's getting up to tonight, but seriously. One thing at a time. “Don’t worry about it, hon. Scott, give Derek your keys and he’ll bring you home. I can give Allison a ride.”

Scott and Allison seem to notice Derek for the first time, and both blanch at the sight. Laura suppresses a sigh. Derek is behind her, and out of her line of sight, but she can imagine only too clearly how he looms overlarge, with his stubble and a leather jacket that matches Laura’s own, the look tied together with his default bitchface.

“He’s soft and fluffy on the inside, I swear,” Laura tells them, in the same tired voice she always ends up using to explain Derek. Her brother snarls softly at her in retaliation, too quiet for human ears.

Luckily, Scott recovers pretty quickly, and tosses Derek his keys with a shaking hand. Standing up, Laura offers Scott and Allison each a hand in turn and helps them to their feet. As Scott walks around to the passenger side of his mom’s car, Allison stops him with a gentle hand on his arm.

“Feel better,” she tells him, soft and sweet. She bites her lip and searches Scott’s face before darting in to leave a quick kiss on his cheek. Blushing, she adds, “Call me!” and lets him go.

Laura gives Derek a meaningful glance over Allison and Scott’s heads, and he nods back at her. Good. Scott’s introduction to the only other member of his new pack will be Derek reading him the riot act about having gone out tonight. There is absolutely no way this could possibly go wrong. Frankly, they both deserve it, in Laura's uncharitable opinion, but it's a tossup over who will hate her more for it, Scott or Derek.

Turning to Allison, Laura gives the girl her gentlest smile. “Hop on in. You do live in town, right?” Have the Argents actually moved here, or are they just in town so they can hunt down Laura’s uncle? Fun question, one that Laura is definitely not going to ask Argent’s teenage daughter. At least, not directly.

Allison nods and slides into the passenger seat of the Camaro. She’s biting her lip again, and Laura is actually a little touched by how worried the girl is for Scott. “Yeah, we live up in that new-looking cul-de-sac? I think it’s called like Creekwood something. Cliffs? Bluffs?” She scrunches her nose in apology. “Sorry, we just moved here like, last week. I don’t actually have my address memorized yet.”

Laura smiles her understanding. “Yeah, I get that. Derek and I are only visiting the Stilinskis — do you know Stiles?” Allison nods and smiles a little. “Yeah, I guess Scott and Stiles do come as a package deal,” Laura acknowledges, which earns her a quiet laugh. “But yeah, the town’s changed a lot since we last lived here, so I understand how hard it is. I do know what development you’re talking about, though.”

They make quiet small talk for the remainder of the drive, and Allison seems that much calmer for it when Laura pulls the car up outside the large suburban stereotype she identifies as her house. Laura would have known it anyway: the smell of Argent and, more notably, the choking scent of dried wolfsbane make it unmistakable. Allison thanks Laura for the ride and gets out of the car, and that should be the end of that. Unfortunately, Argent is not, in fact, in the woods hunting down the last of Laura’s family. He is, instead, opening the front door with a frown on his face that shifts to alarm when he spots Laura.

Clenching his jaw, Argent marches out of the house, pausing only to tell Allison, tersely, to get inside. Laura sighs and rolls down the passenger window and braces herself for whatever bullshit is coming.

“Hale,” Argent growls. “Care to tell me what the hell you’re doing with my daughter?”

“Giving her a ride home, out of the kindness of my heart,” Laura says, dry as a desert. When Argent’s frown only intensifies, she sighs and tries again, a little more sincerely. “Her date got sick halfway through the party. I went to pick him up, and offered Allison a ride, too, since he drove them both. Not everything has a sinister motive.”

Argent scoffs. “It does when your uncle is calling for revenge and seems to think my family is involved.”

“If you’ll remember,” Laura sneers, serving Argent’s attitude back with interest. “I’m the one he _gutted_ last night, not you. I know you and your goddamned _Code_ , Argent. I don’t know what the hell is happening with Peter, but I don’t hold you responsible for the fire. I got the revenge spiral pictures, too.” Laura follows the line of Argent’s gaze to where she’s absently put her hand over the still-healing wounds from last night. She hastily moves her hand back to the gear shift and glares. “I have to go. Full moon and all, I’m sure you don’t want me hanging around.”

Argent bares his teeth in a surprisingly lupine manner. He who hunts monsters, huh? But he steps back from the car all the same.

Revving the engine just to be obnoxious, Laura calls out the window, “Good luck explaining to your daughter why you were a prick to the good samaritan who brought her home!” and peels out.

Her heart is beating too fast, and she can feel the pull of the moon in her bones more than usual. She keeps the windows rolled down and lets the wind tangle in her hair, pulling it loose from her braid. Laura takes the long way home, breathing deep the scent of trees and frost and moonlight as she speeds along the back roads that run the edges of the Preserve. Distantly, she hears Peter howl, and it sends a shiver down her spine.

Even with the windows down, the car still smells of Argent. Laura yearns, and hates herself for it.

The morning after the first full moon finds the Stilinski kitchen more crowded than John can remember it being in years. Possibly ever, actually. Even when Claudia was alive, they were always a pretty small, self-contained family. Holidays were always just the three of them, or very occasionally the five of them once Rafael was gone for good.

But now, John comes downstairs on a Saturday morning to find the coffeemaker already brewing what must be a second pot, given that everyone already has a cup in hand. Laura and a man who can only be Derek sit hunched together at one end of the table, looking wan and tired, Derek’s face buried in Laura’s shoulder like he’s trying to deny the existence of the rest of the world. Scott looks just as dead on his feet, holding his coffee but not drinking it, wincing as he pulls — are those _leaves_ in his hair?

Stiles is digging through the fridge, trading snark with Laura about what kind of breakfast is best for a “full moon hangover.” And leaning up against the sink, dressed in her scrubs and looking amused at the world, Melissa clutches her own cup of coffee. She smiles softly when she spots John, jerking her head to indicate that he should come stand with her. It’s a good idea: she’s basically marked out the part of the counter with the coffee maker as her turf. Good woman.

“This is lively,” he mutters in Mel’s ear as he reaches for a mug. There’s only two left in there, and one of them is Claudia’s, and hasn’t been used in years. Huh. This keeps up, he’s going to need to invest in some more dishes. It’s weird to think about.

He brushes the thought off, though, and pours himself a cup of coffee. The pot’s not done yet, and the hissing sound of the drip hitting the hot plate causes Stiles to emerge from the refrigerator and point an accusing finger at John.

“I’ve told you not to do that,” he says sternly. It’s adorable, really, how he thinks he can boss John around. “It ruins the balance of caffeine and flavor for the whole pot.”

John raises an eyebrow at him. “Son, you put so much shit in your coffee, there’s no way you can actually taste the stuff. Besides, everyone else got some before me. In my own kitchen, no less. Traitors.” He directs this last to the room at large, to a mix of chagrined smiles (the McCalls) and unrepentant cackling (Laura and his son). John smiles and sips his coffee — nice and strong, because that’s the good stuff at the beginning of a new pot. “Would anyone like to explain why there's some sort of party in my kitchen before nine in the morning? One to which, I might add, I was not invited.”

Laura shrugs. “Full moon hangover.”

When that seems to be all she has to say on the matter, John tries looking to Melissa for explanation. She just shrugs, clearly as lost as he is, though significantly less bothered by this. “Kiddo, you’re going to need to be more specific than that. You’ve managed to get the whole, _werewolves are a thing_ bit through my head, but that doesn’t grant me any insight to whatever weird shit that entails.”

Scott groans and thunks his head on the table. He and Stiles both have a habit of doing that, and John sometimes wonders if repetitive minor head trauma is part of the reason these two are the way they are.

Derek, on the other hand, manages to emerge from his hiding place against his older sister and offers a shrug. “Our power waxes and wanes with the moon,” he says, voice rough and deeper than John remembers. Which makes sense; kid was barely fifteen the last time John saw him, and probably half a foot shorter. “Full moons are like a natural high, I guess. And if you indulge in it,” Here, he spares a glare for Scott, who must sense it somehow, because he raises a single finger in Derek’s direction. Laura giggles, and for once, Mel doesn’t even bother to chide Scott for rudeness. “Then you pay for it in the morning,” Derek concludes. His frown deepens. “Also, none of us got much sleep last night.”

“Really not my fault,” Scott tells the table, in the tone of one who has already said some variation on this several times this morning. “I wasn’t the one chasing a teenager through the woods at two in the morning.”

John and Mel share a Look at that, but neither asks for clarification.

Derek snorts. “I wouldn’t have been chasing you through the woods if you hadn’t broken out of the house to go try stalking your girlfriend.”

Scott’s head shoots up, and he’s wearing a blush and that stubborn, mulish sort of look that John has learned to dread over the years. “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

Mel leans into John and whispers, “My son has a girlfriend?”

John shrugs, because how the hell would he know. Apparently, werewolves are real, so anything is possible.

“No,” Derek sneers. “You lost control, just like Laura said you would —”

“Alright, enough,” Laura interrupts, voice firm and commanding enough to shut up both Scott and her brother. Still, John thinks he catches a flash of gold from Scott’s eyes before he looks down at his coffee again. “Yes, Scott lost control. Because he’s _sixteen_ and it was his _first full moon_. Part of this is on me, because I should’ve been keeping a closer eye on you. And part of it is on you, because I told you to stay home and lock yourself in your room til I got back, and you went to a party instead.”

Scott still looks defiant. “And part of it’s _Derek’s_ fault, because he chased me through the Preserve for hours!”

Both Laura and Derek respond to that with matching grins, the kind that John can only think to describe as “wolfish.” It is, frankly, creepy as hell.

“Nah,” says Laura. “That’s just good old-fashioned fun. I once stole Der Bear’s favorite stuffed animal and dragged it all over the Preserve and then halfway to the County line and back. Led him on a wild goose chase all night long on a full moon, just because he annoyed me.”

“Laura,” Derek whines — whines, like the younger sibling he is — and shoves Laura’s shoulder with his own. “Don’t tell him that shit. Also, I was six.”

“He’s Pack now, D,” Laura says serenely. “He gets to know these things.” Her smile grows again in a way that bodes ill for Derek before she adds, “It was an otter. He used to have this little stuffed otter that he brought everywhere with him, and he held it by its little hand because otters like to hold hands when they float so they don’t get separated.”

Well, then. John and Mel exchange glances, then look away from each other so they don’t burst into laughter. Scott and Stiles have no such compunctions, and they both look like Christmas has come early. Poor Derek, on the other hand, looks miserable, and his cheeks and ears are bright red with embarrassment.

“I hate you,” he tells Laura. “I really, really hate you.”

“No you don’t,” she replies, cheerful and unapologetic. “You _love_ me.” And she plants a loud, wet kiss on top of Derek’s head.

The ensuing scuffle is so reminiscent of Scott and Stiles that John can’t help but laugh. Stiles catches his eye and grins, pleased as punch with the crowded kitchen. He’s finally out of the fridge, carrying a precarious armful of foodstuffs over toward the stove.

John thinks of all the lonely mornings they’ve had, all of them. Scott and Mel, even when Rafa was still around being an asshole. He and Stiles, and the silence after Claudia died. Laura and Derek, alone and on the run for so long, unable to rest after their devastating loss. And somehow it’s all come to this, all of them laughing over coffee in John’s kitchen on a Saturday morning. It feels, somehow, like family here.

John wonders if this is what Pack means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please do not taking driving advice from the Hales


	5. an interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> supernatural academia is a Thing (dark academia, show me the werewolf studies?), and Stiles has questions. it's all for educational purposes, obviously.

**Stiles:** okay are werewolf mates a thing

 **Fearless Leader:** Stiles it's 3 in the goddamn morning  
stop bothering me or I'll wake up Derek

 **Stiles:** pls dont  
laura pls tell me i tried to google it and i ended up in wincest abo hell

 **Fearless Leader:** I have no idea what most of that means. Talk to me in the actual morning.

* * *

 _An excerpt from Hector Bennett and Harold S. Liebmann’s_ Lunar Legends: Myths and Traditions of European Wolflore, _in poorly photocopied third-hand pdf format, with notations by Stiles Stilinski_

_The idea of True Mates is not dissimilar to the human tradition of soulmates, with the fairly significant exception that there is actual_ evidence _for the existence of True Mates. The phenomenon is rare enough that it is, admittedly, difficult to gather significant data, much less create any sort of statistical analysis. What follows has been compiled from nearly a dozen generations of anecdotal evidence from a dozen old werewolf families, whose origins range across most of Western Europe._

**_What are True Mates?_ **

_The most succinct definition is that True Mates are two wolves — or, more rarely, a wolf and another shifter or even a human — who have been chosen by fate (or, depending on who one might ask, God or even the Moon)* for each other. They are meant to perfectly complement one another in every respect, as if they are two parts of one whole. It’s difficult to say much beyond this without getting into the bog of superstition and myth-making, but the same can be said for nearly every aspect of this topic._

(*is the moon like a god? is there a religious aspect I’m missing? do werewolves have their own religion?? is there a different werewolf jesus???)

_All of the stories we have been able to collect have led us to the descriptions and conclusions listed below. We do recommend taking all our collected evidence with a grain of salt, as stories of True Mates, no matter how well substantiated, are always love stories at heart, and as such likely romanticized beyond the truth._

**_Abilities, Enhancements, and Side Effects_ **

_The most notable and widely agreed upon feature of True Mates is the instinctive recognition of one another. For mated pairs, the scent of their Mate is uniquely strong. The scent can be easily picked out of large crowds, and the traces seem to linger long after a normal scent pattern would have faded. This strength is entirely undetectable by those outside of the Mated pair. The first scenting of a True Mate has often been likened to a physical blow. Many report stumbling or falling when this occurs, as if the scent alone — even from some distance away — is enough to trip them up. Another common description is an involuntary hyperfocus on the scent and, occasionally, heartbeat of the Mate. When two fated wolves meet, they often hyperfixate on each other to the exclusion of their surroundings.*_

(*scott and allison??)

_True Mates also, over time, develop a bond with each other that is similar to, but distinct from, the pack bond.* Besides an increased awareness of each other generally, True Mates can supposedly find each other unerringly across miles, pick up each other’s distinct heartbeat in crowded places from up to a mile away, and communicate strong emotions and ideas deliberately across the bond. There are also unsubstantiated claims that True Mates, especially those with stronger, established bonds, have enhanced healing capabilities when in physical proximity to one another, as well as generally increased strength and endurance._

(*see ravenswood’s thicker than water ch 1-6 for pack bond)

_As far as anecdotal knowledge of these things goes, the above is true for bonded wolves and for wolves bonded with other shifters. There is significantly less information available on wolf/human Mated pairs, though what we did find indicates that the aforementioned advantages and abilities apply only to the werewolf member of a pair.*_

(*ask allison re: increased focus? endurance?)

* * *

 _A series of excerpts from J. Bahorel’s_ A Love for the Ages: Seventeen Legendary Stories and the Truth at Their Heart, _photocopied and annotated by Laura Hale, with further notes from Stiles Stilinski_

Stiles — It’s real, though rare. S+A’s experience will be different b/c S had just turned when they met; he probably won’t be able to separate their experience from general changes. This is a solid description, and JB’s other work on the topic is well-respected. I’ve found it to be compatible with my own understanding as well.**

**what the fuck does this mean ????

_I will not shy away from the more romantic aspects of these stories, though other scholars do their best to minimize them for the sake of “academic integrity” or some such. The fact remains that the phenomenon is, inherently, a romantic one. Every single known instance of True Mate Pairs has been of romantic and sexual partners, and to deny this in an attempt to appear more impartial or distanced from the topic is insincere and does a disservice to any truth they manage to communicate._

_And gods above, who are we to deny that greatness and love are so intertwined in all our stories? What is so terribly off-putting to so many other scholars about the kinds of love stories that most humans only hear about in fiction? The stories in this volume all feature historically significant couples throughout the past seven centuries. They have been compiled from primary sources including diaries, news reports, travel logs, and even hunter records; as well as from secondary sources like biographies, histories, etc. A complete bibliography is, of course, available at the end of this book.*_

(*of course I’ve attached the bibliography, Stiles — I wouldn’t do that to you)

_...and only together. “I had never known I was incomplete,” Sarah writes. “Until I met her eyes for the first time. Now she is like the air I breathe, and I cannot comprehend a life separated from her.” The tone of Sarah’s journal shows a marked difference from this date forward. Where prior entries have, at their center, an aching loneliness after Sarah’s expulsion from the pack of her birth, Jeanne’s appearance seems to bring a breath of fresh air. There is no denying that Jeanne alone saved Sarah from becoming an omega, and, given Sarah’s history with the Gale clan, likely from being killed by hunters. But Jeanne gave Sarah a new lease on life in other ways as well: together, they built a new pack, one that brought balance to the entire supernatural community for nearly two hundred years._

_It is worth noting that, forty-six years from the journal entry quoted above, Sarah and Jeanne died within days of each other: Sarah of what appears to have been some kind of respiratory disease, and Jeanne in her sleep three nights later of unknown causes.*_

(*an extreme case — but yes, TM codependency can end like this)

_“...never known. It’s odd, to sink into this feeling of being_ _known_ _so late in my life. I have read the sensation of meeting one’s Mate as being a sort of violent epiphany, but finding my Edward has been nothing like that. Perhaps it is because we are, both of us, past the prime of our life — Edward’s children are grown, and I myself am a widower these ten years. But for us, it has felt like a letting go, releasing a breath after holding it far too long. To be near him, it is unlike anything I’ve ever known, and I am so grateful to have found him at last.”_

_While True Mate Pairs often meet between the ages of fifteen and thirty — given the small sample size, as it were, it is difficult to make any more specific statistical analysis — Edward Grove and Jonathan Hampton are hardly the only Pair to meet later in life. They present an interesting case as well in that they are a double rarity: same-sex pairs seem to be extremely uncommon; Sarah and Jeanne, from the third chapter, are the only other such couple described in this volume._

_Age often brings with it additional complications. Health may not be a major concern of aging, as it is with most humans, but life itself has more time to weave its tapestry as we grow in years. Jonathan and Edward, for example, both had children; and though Jonathan’s wife had died years before, Edward was still married when they met.* The two navigated their relationship with admirable grace, and much credit must be given to Mrs. Hannah Grove for her remarkable care and patience as her husband explored this new aspect of himself. All records indicate that the three of them lived happily together for many years._

(*you asked why not all TMPs work out — this is one reason. esp when one of the pair is human + has no context for something they cannot feel/sense/aren’t experiencing. children especially complicate things. it’s difficult to approach a married human with a family like, we r fated 2 b lol)

_Part of the apparent lack of same-sex Mate Pairs may simply be historical bias: given social attitudes toward homosexuality in Western Europe during the time period my research covers, it would be unsurprising if there were more True Mate Pairs that we simply don’t know about because they were obliged to hide the relationship._

further to your questions about humans in bonded pairs…

_It may be argued — and, indeed, it has been argued — that any evidence or description of the True Mate phenomenon is inherently anecdotal only, and thus unreliable, etc. This is even more true for the non-shifter half of mixed-species Mated Pairs. As yet, there is no conclusive evidence that humans feel any pull or tug of the True Mate bond; what little evidence there is seems to belong solely to established Pairs with well-developed bonds — similar to human members of well-established packs.* There is, perhaps, an argument to be made from this that human/human soulmate bonds exist as well as shifter Mate bonds; perhaps humans just do not experience the initial attraction the same way that shifters do. After all, our overall experience of the world is so wildly different, I personally would not find this astonishing._

(*S+A might eventually form the kind of bond spoken of here, esp since they already share a pack bond. non-pack humans don’t experience any of this. a wolf could see their human mate on the street and have their entire world knocked off its axis, and the human would never know)**

**speaking from personal experience, hale???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> imagine these are pdf files saved in Stiles's "werewolves 101" folder. also, the text exchange and the notes take place a little further down the timeline from where we are now, probably a month or two down the line. I just wanted to include this because it was fun and I needed a bit of extra space before the next chapter, which is longer and more intense :)


	6. chapter four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peter begins his gleeful murder spree, shots are fired, and Derek and Laura have some big feelings. Or, as it's labeled in my outline, _Family Trauma: The Laura and Derek Story_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> little late with this, but there was an actual literal coup at the US capitol today so I was glued to the cnn livestream instead of editing all afternoon.
> 
> okay so this is an...intense chapter. I'm actually pretty proud of how it turned out, but we get into some of the gritty trauma shit that the show never addressed properly :)
> 
> warnings: reference to past rape/sexual abuse of a minor (derek and kate); descriptions of trauma responses, including but not limited to panic attacks, nightmares, and physical illness; minor self-harm; graphic depiction of violence and wounds; (nonviolent) abuse of police power; general warning for kate argent; references to canonical death/murder

Laura and Derek are very carefully not talking about their plans for Beacon Hills. It’s been nearly three weeks now since Laura arrived, and that’s already about three times longer than she initially intended to stay. She's got her thesis advisor breathing down her neck via unopened emails, probably wanting an updated draft of Laura's draft that was due two weeks ago. She's technically on emergency leave at her job, but that runs out in another week and after that she's pretty much screwed. As for their house, well, Derek’s got their friend Ward getting their mail and watering her houseplants, but he can’t sustain that forever. There’s only so much bullshit hipster coffee Laura can bribe Ward with, unfortunately, even in Brooklyn. Every time they talk, he asks her when they’re coming home; every time, Laura prevaricates and ends up saying, _soon, I promise_.

She doesn’t know how to tell him that every day here feels more like _home_ than New York ever had. Now that she’s back in her territory, run through the woods in her bare feet and felt the magic of this place ringing through the earth; now that’s she’s spilled fresh Hale blood on that earth and felt the thrill of the forest rejoicing at the return of the pack; now that she’s here, she doesn’t know if she can leave again.

She doesn't know how to tell Derek this, either.

Derek isn’t nearly as comfortable in Beacon Hills as Laura is. Part of it, she thinks, is that he was still pretty young when they left: nearly a third of his life has been spent on the run from the land of his birth.

There’s more to it, though. Since that first night in Beacon Hills, Derek has grown steadily quieter and more withdrawn. He doesn’t really leave the Stilinskis’ except to join Laura on runs through the Preserve, and he doesn’t really talk to anyone but Laura. Scott’s noticed his silence, and has checked with Laura twice now to make sure Derek isn’t mad at Scott in particular.

Derek and Laura share the guest bedroom at Stilinski’s. John was apologetic at first, and offered to set up the couch for one of them, but Laura and Derek had shrugged him off. They’ve shared tighter quarters; Laura made a joke when Stilinski first offered that his guest bedroom might actually be bigger than their apartment back east. It’s hard, too, to explain to humans the tactile nature of wolves without it getting weird. She and Derek have shared a bed even when they didn’t need to on too many occasions to count. When their family was still alive, Derek and Laura would curl up in a pile with Philip and Cora and their cousins, Jack, Lizzie, and Nora, in a haphazard nest of pillows and blankets nearly every new moon. On full moons, the whole huge, sprawling family fell into the puppy pile as the moon sunk below the horizon. There is no comfort quite like being surrounded by warm, happy pack, even when that pack is just two broken kids.

But because they share the guest bed, Laura knows her brother isn’t sleeping. He wakes up every few hours, often whimpering or shivering from nightmares. More than once, he’s fled the room upon waking, only for Laura to hear him retching into the toilet moments later. When he comes back to bed, he’s pale and clammy and can’t speak, and he clings to Laura like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he closes his eyes or if he stops touching her.

She hasn’t seen him like this in nearly six years.

He’s shutting down before her eyes, and it’s like years of therapy skills have just disappeared. Laura’s terrified, and she doesn’t know what to do, and her baby brother _won’t tell her what’s wrong_.

Laura wants nothing more than to stay in Beacon Hills, to bring her houseplants here and put down roots of her own. She wants to maybe think about establishing a pack, a real one, a growing one. She wants to be here for Scott, and she wants to keep the Stilinskis and the McCalls close to her, wants to make them all her pack, make them into a family. She wants to somehow save her uncle. She is finally _home_ and she doesn’t want to give it up. But it’s _killing_ Derek.

Which is why she feels so incredibly guilty to even be _looking_ at apartments online this fine Wednesday morning. Stilinski has bullied Derek into helping him with the grocery shopping, which Laura is pretty sure is just John’s way of checking in, and also probably a ploy to get things Stiles normally wouldn’t allow within a mile of the cart. The thing is, the Hales have been living off the Stilinskis’ hospitality for nearly a month, and Laura’s not sure how sustainable it is. She and Derek are wolves, and thus generally more comfortable in close proximity to each other and in a house crowded with family. But John and Stiles are pretty solitary people; before the Hales landed on their doorstep, Laura doesn’t know that they even saw each other very much. There's also the fact that Laura and Derek have only ever lived with _pack_ before, and instinct and lifelong habit both are clamoring for her to treat the Stilinskis like pack, which is its own complicated bundle of crap.

So yeah, she’s looking at places for her and Derek. A part of her wonders if living somewhere of their own, somewhere that only smells like them, might help Derek. And another part of her knows she's only wondering that because she really, really, _really_ wants to make a home here. Her concession to Derek’s nerves about Beacon Hills generally is that she’s only looking at places with month-to-month leases available. There are some surprisingly nice places in town, though they’re predictably concentrated downtown and in what was formerly the warehouse district. If she wants something near the Preserve, she’d need to probably buy land and build a house. Speaking of…

Laura switches tabs on her laptop and gets on the Beacon County website. Even if they don’t stay, the land and the house have been in the Hale family for generations, and the county has no business calling dibs just because Laura and Derek had to run for their lives. The house is _hers_ , even if there’s not much left of it. Laura wants it back.

She ends up spending the entire rest of the morning on phone calls with various people at the County government. Laura is immensely grateful for all the years spent working shitty customer service jobs, because she has an incredible _let me speak with your manager_ voice, combined with a deadly ability to outdo the best of passive aggressive politeness. She’s passed through the same three departments back and forth, across so many layers of management and bureaucracy that she’s actually begun to wonder if there’s some sort of self-contained sisyphean hell inherent in government, and whether that counts as a mark against the balance of the supernatural (and if so, why the hell Deaton hasn’t done anything about it) until she finally gets ahold of someone who agrees to email her some paperwork.

She makes herself another pot of coffee and an elaborate lunch as a reward for not killing anyone or even wolfing out at the kitchen table during that whole ordeal, and the mac and cheese bake is just coming out of the oven when John and Derek get home. It’s a pleasant sort of domesticity, serving up the food and eating lunch all together. It feels natural and familial and Laura loves Stilinski beyond words for giving this to her and Derek. When she relates her morning’s work to them, John grins and offers her a printer for the paperwork and his weight to throw around at the County if necessary. Derek...well. Derek just looks into his coffee like it might hold all the answers and gives her a silent nod, but it's a reaction, at least, so Laura's calling it a win.

Once John goes upstairs to change into his uniform and get ready for work, Laura takes a minute to study her brother. Derek barely slept at all last night — it was one of the nights where his nightmares had him vomiting and shaking after — and it shows. He has dark circles under his eyes, and he forgot to shave, and he looks so much older than his 21 years. He’s only been here two weeks, but Laura could swear he’s lost weight.

He can’t go on like this.

“Hey, D,” she says, voice soft. She nudges him gently with her elbow, and he starts. He’d spaced out again — he seems to do that more and more often lately. Derek looks at Laura with tired eyes and waits for her. Damn. “You can’t keep on like this. No, don’t start with me,” she says firmly when it looks like he might protest. “You’re not okay, Derek. You’re not okay in a very big way that is honestly scaring me a bit. And you won’t talk to me, and I can’t make you.” She could, actually, and they both know it. But Mom wasn’t that kind of alpha, and Laura has no intention of being that way either.

(She can’t help but wonder if Peter is the kind of alpha who would compel his pack into doing exactly what he wants, regardless of their will. She thinks he might be, and she’s suddenly viciously glad that Scott is already hers.)

It takes him a couple of minutes, and more than a few false starts, stuttering half-formed vowels, but eventually Derek swallows and manages, “You’re trying to get the house back from the County?”

Not at all what Laura was expecting, but at this point she’ll take anything. She nods.

Derek takes a deep breath, seems to steel himself. “I want to see it.”

Laura hesitates for a long moment, because she really doesn't think Derek is in the best shape to go see the destroyed remains of their family home. Hell, she’s been trying to put this off as long as possible. Three weeks, and she’s managed to avoid being within a mile of the house. Eventually, though, she gives Derek another nod. If this is what he wants, if this is what he's asking for, it's the least Laura can do for him.

Derek somehow manages to sink even further into silence on the drive, his heartbeat the loudest thing in Laura's ears as they approach the old house. The driveway is overgrown, the gravel almost entirely overtaken by weeds, and the trees on either side create a canopy so dense it’s as though they’re trying to consume it. It lends an eerie darkness to the journey as Laura slowly guides the Camaro as far into the woods as it will reasonably go. When she doesn’t feel safe pushing her beautiful, too-fancy car further up the ruined drive, she parks and gets out. It takes nearly a minute for Derek to follow suit; he seems to be lagging, somehow, like audio out of sync with a movie.

Laura can smell the old, wet ash from here.

It’s another five minutes of walking before they emerge from the treeline into what was once the Hale family backyard. The sight of the house is a physical blow. Laura’s knees go weak, and she instinctively grabs at Derek’s shoulder to keep herself upright. Derek actually _whimpers_ at the sight.

It’s a skeleton. It’s as much of a corpse as the bodies of their family Laura and Derek watched the firefighters and paramedics remove from the house six years ago. It’s a corpse that’s been left like a horrible memorial, like a warning to the remaining Hales, like a forgotten grave. It’s _awful,_ and the worst part is that it still feels like home.

Laura makes herself take a step forward, and then another. When Derek doesn’t automatically move with her, she reaches back and takes his hand in a firm grip. She needs him for this, and he just needs this. She thinks. She hopes.

The porch is somehow mostly intact, and the old porch swing seems to have more structural integrity than the rest of the house altogether. The stairs creak when Laura first takes a step onto them, and it’s the same sound they’ve always made, though a little muffled by the overgrown weeds creeping out from beneath the decking and lattice. Laura squeezes Derek’s hand and tries not to cry.

There isn’t a front door anymore. They walk right into what used to be the family room, and the sight of it makes Laura feel like she’s dying, too many years too late, alongside her family. This is worse than the funerals, worse than the only two visits to the cemetery she’s ever made. Here, there is still evidence that the Hales were _people_ once, that they were a family, that they _lived_. Furniture, broken and molding, filled with nests of little forest critters that never would have dared get within a hundred yards of the house when the Hales were alive. The curtains that Aunt Rosalind had picked out after her oldest, Jack, had torn up the old ones during a particularly bad full moon, now lying on the floor covered in dust and dead leaves that have blown in through broken windows. Shards of glass and splintered bits of door and window pane still litter the floor from where they were scattered by the fire axes and water cannons six years ago. The walls are dark with smoke damage, obscuring the pale sage-green paint of the walls and curling the half-burnt floral wallpaper on what Dad had triumphantly insisted was an “accent wall” and Mom had stubbornly insisted was “an eyesore.”

Laura and Derek make it to the middle of the room before they fall to the floor in an apparently mutual inability to go any further into the house. Laura’s got no idea what her own expression looks like, but Derek is ashen and his lower lip is trembling and his eyes are shining with the tears he’s barely holding in.

“I thought, coming here…” Laura trails off, unable to remember any longer, let alone articulate, why she thought this would be any sort of good idea. “I thought it might give us something. I don’t know. The thing that other people get when they visit a grave, maybe. I thought I might be able to feel them here.” She chokes on this, and Derek lets out another whimper, like Laura is hurting him. And she is, she knows; she’s hurting herself, too. But she also knows this is long overdue; she and Derek have never actually dealt with this, not together. She's never let him see her in the depths of her grief before because she wanted to be strong for him. Now she wonders if she only made him feel like he was alone in his own hurt.

“I thought maybe I could feel Mom, here, you know?” she continues, swallowing hard around the sob building in her chest. “That maybe being here would make me feel closer to them. Maybe then I could understand what’s happened to Peter. Maybe I could find a way to fix this, fix him. To bring him back to us.”

“Is it working?” Derek asks. Despite the wetness in his eyes, his voice is dry and cracking.

Laura shakes her head. “No. It just...I want to go home, Derek. I want so badly to come _home_.

“But it’s gone, isn’t it. It has been for a long time.”

Derek collapses into her, his head on her shoulder and face buried in her neck, stubble scratching the sensitive skin of Laura’s collarbone. He’s shaking, she realizes, just like after his nightmares. She squeezes his hand, still clutched in hers, and tries to communicate a comfort she herself cannot find. Derek squeezes back, at least. And that’s got to be something.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks into her skin. He’s crying in earnest now, and Laura can feel his tears dampening her shirt. “God, Lo, I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too, Der-Bear,” she says, her own voice thick. She lets go of his hand and wraps her arms around him, rocks them back and forth together there on the floor of their family home.

Derek shakes his head into Laura’s shoulder. He reaches up a hand and clenches it in the fabric of Laura’s jacket, like he’s trying to hold her there; like he’s afraid to hold her there. “No, I’m _sorry_. It’s — it’s my fault.”

Oh, and Laura’s heart _breaks_. Has he been carrying this, all these long years?

“No, no, no no no,” she croons in his ear, holding him even tighter to her. “No, baby brother, it’s not, I promise it’s not.”

“It _is_ ,” he insists, a desperate gasp through his sobs. “It is, Laura, I might as well have lit the fire myself —” The thought is cut off by the strength of his sobbing, deep, rasping things that make his chest heave and send tremors through them both. “I did it, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, I’m sorry.”

“No, baby, no.” She’s so scared. “God, Derek, why would you ever think that? Honey, no, no it’s not your fault. You didn’t do this, I promise, you didn’t. Some sick fuck of a hunter did this to us, not you, baby, never you.”

Derek wrenches himself from Laura’s grasp, which is no small feat given how tight Laura’s trying to hold onto him. He scrambles away from her, and his face — _oh, god, Derek, what happened to you?_ His face is smeared with tears and little grey stains from the ash they’ve disturbed just by being here. But his eyes are wide and wild and so, so afraid.

Derek is scared of Laura.

Her baby brother is _afraid of her_. God, what has Laura _done_?

Still, he holds eye contact as he visibly braces himself to say something. Laura’s so scared of what’s coming and she just wants Derek back in her arms. His voice, when it comes, is low enough that a human might not have been able to hear it, even though he’s only a few feet away. “She did it because of me.”

“What?”

Derek’s lip trembles with fear, and something that Laura is starting to suspect might be self-hatred, and he says it again. “It’s my fault. She did it because of me.”

Laura has to stop and let this sink in. The words make no sense. They just — what the hell can Derek possibly mean, this doesn’t make any _sense_. She finally manages to form a question (and there are so many questions and she’s choking on them all), and it’s just, “Who?”

“Her name is Kate,” he tells her, and then he drops his eyes. “Her name is Kate and she killed them because of me.”

And she’ll have time later to address the subject of why, exactly, Derek has been silent on the identity of their family’s murderer for years, when he has apparently known all along. For now, she just wants Derek to _look_ at her again. “Why would you say that, Der? Why would you think it was because of you?”

“Because I’m the one who let her in,” he chokes. Laura can’t see his face, ducked and turned away from her, but she can see his hands on his thighs, and she can see the claws that are emerging from the tips of his fingers. They puncture his jeans like the denim is paper, digging into the skin of his own legs. Already, blood forms little red halos around the holes. “I told her about us, Laura. I told her about us, and I told her how I used the trellis beneath my window to sneak out and back in again. And I — I l-left clothes at her p-p-place and she wore them when she came, I know she did. So she would smell like me. So they wouldn’t know.”

Here, he looks at Laura again at last, and his expression is so tormented that Laura can hardly stand to meet his gaze. “She burned them all and she smelled like me when she did it.”

Laura can’t even comprehend all the implications of Derek’s words, all of them battering at the edges of her mind. She can’t, and frankly she doesn’t want to. Right now, all she wants is for Derek to stop looking like that, stop feeling like that. She crawls toward him, barely noticing when she cuts her knee on a bit of broken glass, a shard of window still sharp after all this time. Gently, so gently, Laura reaches out and takes Derek’s hands in her own, pries his fingers, one by one, from his legs, making formless soothing sounds as she straightens his fingers and wipes the blood from their tips with the edge of her t-shirt. She folds both of his hands into one of hers, for once a little grateful for her awkwardly enormous hands, and wraps her other arm around him, gathers him to her chest, practically pulls him into her lap.

“That’s still not your fault,” Laura whispers. She holds Derek’s head to her chest, his ear just above her heart, so he can hear the truth of her words, can hear the sure and steady beat as she tells him again, “That’s not your fault, Der. That’s a monster who _used_ you to do evil. She would have found a way, even without you. It’s not your fault.”

“It _is,_ ” Derek keens, even as he wraps his own arms around Laura’s waist, squeezing hard enough to hurt. “She would never have known about us if it wasn’t for me, she would never have gotten in, she wouldn’t — she’d — they’d _still be alive, Laura and it’s all my fault._ ”

“No,” and it’s all Laura can manage right now. “No. No it isn’t, never was, never will be. Not your fault, Derek, not your fault. God, I’m so sorry baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were carrying this all these years.”

Derek doesn’t seem to be capable of any more words right now, and he just clings to Laura and cries and shakes and cries and cries and cries. Laura thinks of how Stilinski had held her, that first day back. How she had finally let herself go, let herself be held and comforted for the first time since the fire. She wonders if Derek has ever let anyone hold him like this, ever let his grief see the light of day. Somehow, she doesn’t think he has.

She doesn’t know how long they sit there, wrapped in each other and their grief in the shelter of the shell of their home. When they finally move again, the light has dimmed considerably, the sun sinking down below the trees and the air losing what little warmth it held during the day. Clouds have gathered outside, and a cool breeze has started up, smelling of petrichor and frost. When Derek gives a little shiver from the cold, Laura untangles their limbs and they gather themselves up from the floor. Laura takes a moment, once they’re standing, to gently brush dust and ash and tears from Derek’s face with her thumb, a gentle reminder that she loves him. That she’ll take care of him.

They’re both quiet on the walk back to the car, and Laura finally allows herself to start to really process what Derek has just confessed. That he knew the killer, yes. But more than that, he’d _trusted_ her. He’d told her about their family, had snuck out of the house to see her, had spent time at her place. Laura realizes with a horrible sinking feeling that, if she understands this right, fifteen-year-old Derek had sex with, had probably lost his virginity to, the woman who murdered almost everyone he loved.

Laura’s pretty sure Derek must have loved her, too, this Kate.

Laura wants to eviscerate this woman with her own bare hands. She wants to find her, to sink her claws into her chest and break her ribs one by one before removing the useless muscle she calls a heart and eating it, raw and bloody. Maybe then this _Kate_ will understand a fraction of what it is she has done to Laura and Derek.

When they arrive at the car, Laura pauses before she climbs in, turns for one last look at the trees that block the house. She feels oddly lighter, leaving this place, than she had on arriving. She can only hope that it has done something similar for her brother.

Laura doesn’t start the car right away, instead sitting in silence with Derek and thinking about what she needs to say to him. She has the sense that, if she fucks this up, Derek will never forgive himself for this. If she can’t do this right, Derek will forever believe that he is the cause of their family’s death, and that is just...Well. Laura can’t have that, that’s all.

“Thank you for telling me about her, Derek,” she says finally. Her voice seems loud in the claustrophobic confines of the Camaro, even though she knows she’s barely speaking above a whisper. “I am so sorry that you’ve had to carry this by yourself for all these years. I cannot imagine how lonely and awful that must have been. But it’s not like that anymore, okay? We’re going to carry this together, now.”

Laura pauses and turns to look at Derek, study whatever reaction he’s having. His face is still wan, but his eyes are dry. He stares out the window, but when Laura pauses he nods his head slightly, at least confirming that he heard her.

“And at some point I’m going to have more questions for you.” Derek flinches at this, actually flinches away from her, and Laura feels sick with herself. “Because John reopened the case, and we have an actual chance of catching her now. We can’t bring them back, but we can prevent this woman from doing this to anyone else.”

Derek nods again, jaw tense. When he still doesn’t say anything, Laura sighs.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me about it,” she reassures him. It’s not enough, because there is no such thing as actual reassurance for this, she’s pretty sure. “But — Derek, have you told anyone this? Any of your therapists, even?”

He shakes his head, and Laura thinks again of how he’s been carrying this _all alone_ for _six years_. And, if the fear in his eyes earlier was any indication, he’s been carrying it in silence because he was afraid that Laura would blame him, too. That she would reject him. That she would hate him as much as she’s beginning to understand that he hates himself.

Death is too good for Kate, whoever she is.

“I want you to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me, it doesn’t have to be now. We can wait until we get back to New York, or we can find you someone to talk to here. But D, this is hurting you. And baby, you don’t deserve this hurt.”

Derek sucks in a breath at that, sharp and awful, and Laura thinks she’s only scraping the surface of the hurt that Derek thinks he does, in fact, deserve. In the back of her mind, she’s starting to line this new information up with all of Derek’s behavior for the past six years. How, even when they settle somewhere for more than a few months, he doesn’t really make friends. How he hasn’t been close to anyone in years, how he never invites people over to their apartment. How he hasn’t, once, been on a date.

How he actively flinches away from people who flirt with him.

Laura remembers, suddenly, a night four years ago in North Carolina, her and Derek at a Waffle House at some stupid hour of the morning. The waitress had been sweet, and extra sweet to Derek, once she worked out that he and Laura were siblings and not a couple. She had called Derek _sweetie_ , and the blood had drained from Derek’s face and he suddenly stank of _fear_.

And then she stops thinking, because if she keeps up this line of thought, Laura is going to wolf out and Derek is going to think it’s his fault. Already, she can feel his anxiety through the bond, the low-level fear that has followed him since the fire dialed up to eleven. So she takes a deep breath, swallows hard, and tells Derek the one thing she _needs_ him to know.

“I love you, Derek. I love you, and I will always love you, and nothing you tell me will make me love you any less. And _I don’t blame you_. Okay? I don’t blame you at all, not for a second, because it isn’t your fault. I am so sorry that she convinced you that it was, but the only person to blame is the bitch who set the fire. Only her, D. Not you. Never you.

“I love you, little one. I love you to the moon and back again, and absolutely nothing will ever change that. Okay?”

It takes him nearly a full minute to respond to this, but he does, eventually. It’s only a single, tight nod, but Laura will take it. It’s more than she expected, honestly.

She gives him a nod in return, though he’s still not looking at her, and finally starts the car.

Outside, it begins to rain.

_“So, fun fact!”_ Stiles says brightly, and Laura groans. She can already tell this is going to be something awful. Largely because Stiles is calling her and it isn’t even eight in the morning, and Laura still has one hell of an emotional hangover from yesterday.

Still, nothing doing. Stiles is a force of nature, unfortunately. Laura disentangles herself from Derek, who is still asleep somehow, and sits up in bed. “What the hell, Stiles.” It isn’t a question. She doesn’t do questions this soon after waking up.

_“Your uncle managed to murder a goddamn bus driver last night,”_ Stiles informs her. His voice is still hideously cheerful, and Laura genuinely cannot tell if it’s supposed to be sarcastic or ironic or whatever. Stiles is, after all, the kind of morbid little freak who drags his best friend into the woods in the middle of the night to look at dead animal bits.

“Run that one by me again,” is what she says, instead of interrogating his sincerity. That way lies madness.

_“A bus driver was attacked last night. Still on the school bus, which, wow. What a shitty way to go. Like, seriously? Dying in a school bus? Those things reek, man.”_

“Stiles,” Laura growls in warning.

_“Yeesh, calm down. Jeez. No, but seriously, Laura. They’re calling it an animal attack but Scotty here is saying it, and I quote, reeks of that crazy-ass werewolf that bit me, unquote.”_

“Shit.”

_“Yeah, pretty much. Aw, shit my dad is here. I gotta get to class before he sees me and tries to read me the riot act about truancy or whatever. But I thought you’d want to know. It’s definitely your crazy uncle and it’s definitely your problem that there is a freaking corpse on a school bus outside my school right now.”_

And, with that, he hangs up. Laura wishes, very strongly, that she had ignored her phone and kept on sleeping.

Behind her on the bed, Derek stirs, grumbling sleepily and patting the warm empty space where Laura had been. She turns to watch him, smiling fondly as he opens squinty eyes and frowns petulantly at her.

“Why’re you awake.” Derek also doesn’t do questions until he’s had at least two cups of coffee, either asking or answering them. “Come back here. You took all the warm.”

Laura rolls her eyes, but she does as she’s told. If Derek didn’t hear that call, there’s no reason to worry him with it just yet. She’ll let Stilinski handle the crime scene, and in the meantime she’s going to steal another hour or two of shut-eye. She crawls back under the covers and lets Derek tug her against him and closes her eyes. They deserve a little extra rest. Please, let them have this much.

When she wakes again two hours later, Laura regrets her decision. She usually does, when she decides something is a problem for Future Laura. Because Present Laura is always eventually Future Laura, and somehow the problems never manage to go away while she transitions between those two states of being. 

Derek is up and out of bed, and Laura can smell the coffee going downstairs. And the fact that it’s nearly ten in the morning instead of the goddamn crack of dawn does not, unfortunately, change the fact that Laura has a completely unhinged uncle with mysterious and almost certainly ill-gained alpha powers who committed a murder last night. And it is, in fact, still Laura’s problem.

Two weeks back, when she’d told John everything, they hadn’t really talked about what to do about Peter. To all outward appearances, he’s still catatonic, sitting in his goddamn wheelchair and staring out the goddamn window. Laura’s visited twice more, only for about ten minutes each time (much to the disapproval of the receptionist lady). Both visits consisted of Laura hissing a combination of questions, accusations, and vile and creative threats of her own into Peter’s ear, with absolutely no results whatsoever. She has no idea how the hell he’s faking it, but she’s so pissed about it, it’s unreal.

Problem is, now the asshole has actually committed an actual murder, but it is _really very difficult_ to pin the blame on a catatonic patient in long-term care for what is, to all appearances, an animal attack. Laura needs coffee before she can even think about this further.

Downstairs, Derek is slouched at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee. He’s reading, a beat-up paperback that he probably poached from Stiles’s bookshelf, and doesn’t bother looking up when Laura comes in. Normally, they’re both morning people, but Beacon Hills has just been a series of late-night conversations and dealing with idiot teenagers. Even so, Laura has been militant in making Derek and Scott go for daily morning runs with her before Scott has to go to school. Long, slow runs (well, slow for wolves — Stiles, when he comes, spends a lot of time bitching about how they’re going too fast for _mere mortals_ ), where Laura has started teaching Scott the basics of using his senses and tracking scents over distances. On the days when Laura would really rather not be awake, she’s generally kept going by sheer gleeful schadenfreude at making Derek and Scott be awake as well. She’d begged off this morning, though. She and Derek both needed the chance to sleep off yesterday’s conversations.

Laura gets her own cup of coffee and sticks some bread in the toaster before she brings up the Peter Problem, but she’s got to eventually. “Peter killed someone,” she tells Derek, blunt and loud in the quiet morning.

Derek does look up at that. “What.”

“Stiles called this morning. A bus driver at the school was torn apart by ‘wild animals,’” Laura reports, and makes sure to do the air quotes. “Scott said it smelled like Peter.”

Derek raises his eyebrows and frowns. “Why the hell would he go after a bus driver, of all things?”

Laura shrugs. “You really think I understand the twisted inner workings of Peter’s mind?” Derek makes a face that communicates, _fair enough_. “He’s definitely cognizant enough to be picking his victims, so I’m waiting to hear what the guy’s name was and then see if he was at all connected to the fire. He told me he’s going after _everyone who let them get away with it_ , so I’m betting that includes people involved in the investigation and subsequent coverup.”

Derek grunts his acknowledgement, but doesn’t say anything else. Laura’s toast chooses that moment to pop up, so she leaves him to his coffee and reading or brooding or whatever he’s indulging in this morning. She snags peanut butter from the cabinet — the crunchy kind, suck it Stiles — and smears a truly gratuitous amount onto her toast before taking her food and coffee and sliding into the chair next to Derek. They’re quiet for a long while, and it’s nice. Peaceful. Laura leans her shoulder into Derek’s, an easy, quiet comfort for them both.

When Derek finally breaks the silence, it’s not what Laura’s expecting. He doesn’t look up from his book when he speaks, though Laura hasn’t seen him turn a page in at least five minutes.

“I’m going to talk to the Sheriff tonight,” he says. His voice is flat and even, in the way that means he’s expending huge amounts of effort to keep it that way. “About the fire. About — about Kate. Tell him what I know.”

Laura doesn’t say anything. Instead, she leans into him a little harder, and offers him a bite of her toast. He’ll know what she means.

Kate calls in the middle of the goddamn night, and she doesn’t bother with a greeting when Chris picks up.

_“Goddamn alpha nearly ran me off the road,”_ she snarls. Beneath her words, Chris can hear the familiar sound of a shotgun being reloaded. _“I’m just past mile marker 12 on the county road. Get out here and help me get this sonofabitch.”_

And she hangs up. For a younger sister, Kate has always been bossy as hell. Comes of being Dad’s favorite, Chris supposes.

He rolls out of bed, moving carefully so as not to wake Victoria. As he pulls on jeans and a sweater, she turns in bed, moving into the warm, empty space he left behind. Chris can't help the fond smile that rises at the sight, and he pauses to press a gentle kiss on the frown line etched between Victoria's eyebrows before he leaves. She sleeps through it, though her brow smooths out, but Chris must be making some kind of noise because he managed to wake Allison. He sends her back to bed with an excuse about car trouble, and knows she'll forgive and forget all when Kate is here. The two get on like a house on fire, more like siblings than Chris and Kate ever were.

Kate’s in fine form by the time Chris reaches her, petulant and furious. She’s traded the shotgun for a sniper rifle, which means that she shot the alpha at least once with the shotgun and missed. She doesn’t speak as he parks and gets out of the car, just gives him a tight nod and glowers into the darkness. Chris's own gun is more subtle, a handgun tucked into his waistband and already loaded with wolfsbane.

“You said,” Kate says finally, when it becomes clear that the alpha is no longer anywhere nearby. Her voice is tight and annoyed. “That we had a one-werewolf problem in this town.”

Chris frowns over at her. “We do.”

“Nope,” she says, overbright and popping the _p_ a bit. Yeah, she’s pissed. “There’s at least two different alphas here, Chris. Two _alphas_. We are dealing with probably two different goddamn _packs_.”

He shakes his head, frowning at her. Yeah, there are two alphas; but Hale really isn’t the problem here. “The attacks have definitely all been the same one. Why do you think there are two alphas?”

She grins at him and swings the rifle over her shoulder. “Because I shot the second one. Pretty sure I only hit its arm, but it’s got 48 hours at the outside.”

“Was it the feral one?”

Kate snorts. “They’re all feral at heart, Chris. You know that. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Kate,” he admonishes with a frown. “We have the Code for a reason. Now, can you please put the gun away before someone sees you and calls the Sheriff’s department.”

She rolls her eyes at him and opens up her door. For the first time, Chris notices that the driver’s side window is entirely missing — smashed by the alpha presumably. “Don’t give me that shit. We’ve got a week until the next full moon, and now we’ve got one less beast to worry about.”

Uneasily, Chris thinks of Hale in the woods weeks ago. Her wide red eyes, the flat, almost resigned way she’d asked, _are you going to shoot me?_

John’s going to need Laura Hale to stop coming home grievously injured and covered in her own blood. Stiles goes on and on about John's heart health, but it’s looking more and more like he should spend his time berating the Hales rather than wasting his breath to nag John about bacon and curly fries.

Somehow, even though it looks like only a single gunshot wound to her arm (John hates that his life now involves thinking the phrase _only_ a single gunshot), Laura looks to be in way worse shape than she had the time she’d showed up as a wolf with her gut ripped open. Her face is beyond pale, and she looks grey in the weak kitchen light. She’s swaying on her feet, clutching her arm and still doing her damnedest to smile at John.

“What the hell happened to you?” he demands, even as he ushers her over to a chair and forces her to sit before she keels over.

“I am having,” she says, and she sounds horribly short of breath. “A very bad day.”

“No shit,” John snaps. “Take off your sweater, I need to see what we’re working with. Do I need to call Scott? Melissa?”

Laura shakes her head, but does as John asks. “Nothing they can do,” she gasps, voice tight with pain.

Yeah, John doesn’t like the sound of that.

And he doesn’t like the look of her arm, either. The bullet wound itself is mostly closed, or at least is no longer bleeding. But it’s...infected, somehow. The entry wound is a sick, rotten black, grey at the edges, and the blood that is caked around it looks more like tar than like blood. Black lines radiate from the wound, snaking up Laura’s veins in a way that suggests things only get worse from here.

Also, it seems to be issuing a thin stream of glowing blue steam. What the fuck.

“Laura, what is this?”

“Wolfsbane. Hunters, they — look, normal bullets don’t usually kill us, but aconite is extremely toxic. They stuff bullets with dried wolfsbane and,” she uses her right hand to wave in the general direction of her left arm. “This is what it does. I’ve got about...I don’t know, maybe 36 to 48 hours before the toxin reaches my heart and I’m dead.” She leans back in the chair and closes her eyes, clearly drained from only talking.

Yeah, John is terrified.

“How do we fix this?” is what he says, because 48 hours is plenty of time to save the kid. It has to be. The Hales, he’s already decided, have lost enough. “Is there a cure?”

Laura breathes deep and sits up again. “Yeah,” she tells him. And thank God, because otherwise John would’ve had to pull something drastic. Well, depending on the cure, he still might. “Hair of the dog that bit me," Laura says with a thin, crooked smile. "I need the same strand of wolfsbane that was used in the bullet. Burn it, rub the ash in the wound.” She swallows, clenches her jaw, and gives an aborted little shrug. “Worse comes to worst, we can always amputate before the poison gets to my heart.”

John sucks in a sharp breath at how casually she drops the possibility. “Yeah, let’s save that for a last resort. Where do I find wolfsbane? Am I going to have to go hunting through the forest like I’m a witch in a fairy tale?”

Laura snorts a laugh, and shakes her head. “No. It’s not supposed to grow in California, anyway.”

“Not supposed to?”

“Wrong climate. But it sometimes grows when werewolves settle. There used to be a patch of it around the edges of the family property. Bitch during pollen season, let me tell you.”

Cute, but not helpful. “Okay, so if not the woods, where?”

“Hunters,” Laura sighs. “I don’t know who shot me — she was too far away, think she was using a goddamn sniper rifle. But Argent will have wolfsbane. As far as I know, most hunters use the same stuff in their bullets: Nordic Blue Monkshood.”

“How many names does this plant have?” John grumbles. And then, “Wonder if I can get away with arresting him for possession.”

“As entertaining as that would be for me,” Laura says, and she really does seem amused. “Let’s focus on getting the damn stuff and avoiding the whole cutting-off-my-arm scenario.”

“Fair enough. Where’s your brother?”

“Dragging Scott home by the ear, probably.” At John’s raised eyebrow, Laura explains. “Called him, told him there were hunters, and to make sure that Scott was home where he’s supposed to be. Instead of, say, out with the girl whose family threatens our very existence.”

John sighs. “Does no one in this town respect the damn curfew I set?”

“Hate to break it to you, John, but no.”

“Can always count on you to tell it to me straight, Hale.” John stands and looks hard at Laura. Her brow is starting to bead with sweat and her eyes are glassy, as if with fever. “I’m going to Argent’s. You stay here and just...just hang on, okay?”

She nods, and looks so overwhelmingly grateful that it hurts.

He doesn’t bother with a uniform or the cruiser’s lights as he makes his way to the address Laura gave him. This is not exactly police business, after all. And if he thinks about it too hard, the extrajudicial nature of life with werewolves makes his skin crawl, so John is very much not thinking about it just now.

The Argents live in one of those new developments, a cul-de-sac where every house looks the same. It’s very wholesome, cookie-cutter, _Leave it to Beaver_ , which somehow makes it doubly horrifying to John that killers live here. When he rings the doorbell, he only has to wait a moment before the door opens to reveal a stern-looking woman, about his own age, with short hair and crystal blue eyes, wrapped in a robe and a chilly expression.

“Can I help you?” It’s not the most friendly overture John’s ever heard, but it’ll do, considering he’s a stranger on their doorstep late at night.

Still, he gives her a smile and says, “Good evening. I’m looking for Chris Argent. Is he available?”

The woman frowns, but nods tightly. “May I ask what this is regarding?”

“Of course. I’m Sheriff John Stilinski. I just want a word with him about these animal attacks. My understanding is that he’s an experienced hunter.”

She narrows her eyes at that, and John knows that she’s picking up the subtext of what he’s saying, no matter how placid he seems. Probably in part because it's closing in on two in the morning, which would be an odd time for a chat. “One moment.” She shuts the door firmly, leaving John standing in the chill night air with nothing but his grudging admiration for that kind of attitude.

When the door opens again, it’s to a man stepping out onto the stoop and closing the door behind him. He’s John’s age, maybe a little younger, but his hair is mostly grey. He’s John’s height, but leaner, and clearly in good shape. When he smiles, it’s all teeth and feigned friendliness that doesn’t reach his icy eyes.

“I’m Chris,” he says, genially enough. “My wife said you wanted to speak with me, Sheriff?”

“Yes, but I’m not exactly here on official business.”

Argent raises his eyebrows. “How can I help you?”

John smiles, his most pleasant and most electable smile. “Have you heard of the principle of _corpus delicti_? It’s the thing that proves a crime has been committed, literally Latin for the corpse of the victim. When people joke about, ‘no body, no crime,’ they’re actually talking about _corpus delicti_.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the legal lesson,” Argent says, in a tone that implies he very much does _not_ appreciate it. “But is there a point to this visit?”

“I’m going to need one of those fancy bullets I know you’ve got lying around,” John says, still pleasant but not bothering to beat around the bush. “The ones stuffed with Nordic blue monkshood.”

Argent stiffens, and his voice is tight when he says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about _corpus delicti_. See, if you give me one of those bullets, I can treat the bullet wound my friend is currently suffering. The problem goes away, there’s no crime. You don’t hand over the aconite, and suddenly I’ve very much got a murder on my hands. I’m honor bound to investigate the murder of a young woman in my town. Forensics gets brought in, tries to identify the unusual poison that killed her, and finds a specific strain of aconite. Someone, say an anonymous tip, maybe, mentions that you’re known to be in possession of several different varieties of that particular plant. Judge gives us a warrant, then you’ve got cops crawling over your house. Even if they don’t find anything, well.

“You’re new in town. You’re a person of interest in a murder. I can’t imagine it will be very easy to conduct business after that, especially since you are, as I understand, an arms merchant who relies on government contracts. And think of the trouble your daughter might have making friends. The whispers every time your wife goes to the grocery store. Life gets a whole lot harder once you’re under the microscope in a murder investigation, Mr. Argent.”

Throughout this little speech, Argent has dropped all pretense at politeness, and he’s now glaring at John with pure fury in his eyes.

John doesn’t particularly care.

Smiling again, John repeats his request. “So, do you think you could do us both a favor and go grab one of those bullets for me?”

Argent takes a deep breath, like focusing on that is the only thing keeping him from decking John in the face. “They’re in my car,” he bites out. He shoves past John toward one of the newer model SUVs in the drive. John follows, relaxed and at ease, like he’s going for a stroll. Like he doesn’t have a dying girl in his kitchen.

It takes Argent less than a minute of rifling through his trunk to pull out a small wooden box, not dissimilar to a woman’s jewelry box. He hesitates a moment, then shoves the whole thing at John. “There’s a vial of powdered dry wolfsbane in there,” he says, curt. “You don’t need to dig through one of the bullets for it. Burn a pinch of it on a plate or something, then grind the ash into the wound. It will not be a pleasant experience for her, but she’ll live.”

John nods his thanks and takes the box. There are delicate floral carvings along the lid, a strange decoration for a box of death. He looks Argent dead in the eye and asks, “Did you shoot her?”

Argent, to his credit, doesn’t flinch. “No.”

John nods again, then turns back to the cruiser without another word. He’s opened the door and about to climb in when Argent speaks again from behind.

“She — she’s not the only one here,” he says. He’s choosing his words carefully, probably trying to avoid actually saying the word _werewolf_. John doesn’t blame him. “The other one, it’s more dangerous. It has to be stopped, you know it as well as I do. Some of those bullets in there should work for your service gun.”

Yeah, John’s going to elect to ignore that, he decides. He doesn’t make a habit of conducting extrajudicial executions, and he’s not intending to start with Laura’s mad uncle.

“I need you to stop getting hurt and having to bail on training,” Scott informs Laura on Saturday morning. Derek stayed home this morning, so it’s just Scott and Laura stretching their legs at the edge of the Preserve before their run.

“I didn’t exactly _ask_ to get shot, Scott,” Laura says wearily. It is not the first time she’s had to say that sentence this week, although the others have mostly been directed at her brother. Derek is being a little bitch about the whole thing, truth be told.

“Because Stiles decided to take my werewolf training into his own hands,” Scott continues, as if Laura hadn’t said anything. Teenagers. “And his idea of training was duct taping my hands behind my back and throwing lacrosse balls at me and telling me not to _give in to the dark side_ , which is probably a _Star Wars_ thing.”

Laura looks at Scott disbelievingly. “Obviously it’s a _Star Wars_ thing, Scott. How do you not know that?”

“Never seen it,” Scott shrugs dismissively, as if this isn’t a horrifying piece of information that Laura is going to have to rectify as soon as possible or else turn in her Pretty Decent Alpha, All Things Considered™ card. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I don’t like being pelted with lacrosse balls as a way to test my control. I want to learn how to have control all the time, so that when I eventually kill Stiles for being the absolute _worst_ , he’ll know I’m doing it on purpose.”

Laura has to laugh at that. Leaning over, she ruffles Scott’s hair just because she can. “You know, I acquired you entirely by accident but I’m really glad it happened, kiddo. You are a delight.”

Scott gives her a blinding smile, and Laura spares a moment to feel a little bad for the girls at his school. How any of them turn away from those dimples, she doesn’t know. It makes Laura want to pinch his cheeks and give him hard candies like she’s a doting grandmother or something.

“Anyway, control. You may not have realized it, but we’re working on it all the time.” Laura gestures broadly to their running shoes, the Preserve, the world at large. “The more comfortable you are in your skills and your senses, the more you integrate the wolf part of yourself with the human part. The more those two parts become one whole, the more control you’ll have, even on full moons.”

“But what about when I’m stressed, or playing lacrosse or pissed at Stiles? Like, if I feel my control start to slip, what can I do?” He bites his lip and shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet for a moment, then turns to Laura with wide puppy dog eyes. “I don’t want to be a monster, Laura.”

“Oh Scott, honey, you’re not.” Jesus, poor kid. She’s been so preoccupied with Derek and Peter and _getting shot full of fucking wolfsbane_ that she really hasn’t been giving her baby bitten wolf the attention he needs. God, what a shitshow. “You’re a good kid, and you’re going through some bullshit. I know you didn’t choose this, that it was forced on you and you’ve been having to figure so much of it out on your own. And I’m sorry about that, I really am. I haven’t been here for you the way I should be, and until I take care of the Peter Problem I don’t want to promise you anything I can’t give.

“But you’re handling it like a champ, Scott. And I can’t promise to save you from any more Stiles-style training sessions — mostly because I think that sounds hilarious and I want in on it —”

“Hey!”

“But I will promise to teach you everything I can and never leave you to fend for yourself on the full moon. Sound good?”

Scott, bless his little heart, takes a second to actually think it all over. Then he nods, and that adorable smile is back, and he says, “I’ll take it. Tell me about emergency control strategies while we run?”

Laura grins back and says, “If you can keep up, pup.”

Because Laura is a good alpha, she runs Scott so fast and far that he can’t get the breath to interrogate her about control or anchors during the run. When they finally jog up to Laura’s car again, they’re both dripping with sweat and gasping for breath and Laura can’t stop grinning.  
“You can’t run like that in New York,” she tells Scott, when she finally gets enough air to form words. “Not enough room. And the air there sucks.”

“You….shouldn’t...run...like...that...here!” Scott gasps, bent over with his head between his knees. “Fuck. I want my inhaler.”

“Aw, don’t be a baby, Scotty boy!” Laura slaps him on the back, hard. That run was _good_. “You’re fine. God, one of these days I need to do that trail in a full shift. That’s gotta be amazing.”

Scott frowns at her as they move toward the Camaro. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Can I turn into a real wolf, too? Because that might actually be pretty cool.”

“Oh, it super is,” Laura agrees, starting the car and rolling down the windows. “But it’s an alpha thing. There’s an alpha shift, a beta shift, and a partial shift. You can do the partial, which is like what you did at the party, when you held most of it back. And your full shift is the beta shift, which is basically what you were doing when you were running around the woods on the full moon.”

Scott shoots her another dirty look at that, and Laura can’t help but cackle. Maybe she never asked for a baby bitten wolf, but good god above she’s glad to have him. She wants to keep him. She’s pretty sure Derek does, too, which is good. They’ll figure it out somehow.

“But speaking of what you did at the party, the way you were mostly unshifted by the time I got there. That’s what you wanted to talk about earlier, yeah? Being able to hold back or reverse the change, no matter what the moon’s like?”

“Yeah,” Scott sighs and runs a hand through the sweaty hair that flops into his face. He grimaces at the feel of it, shakes his hand out the window like someone shaking dishwater off their hands. “Like, I was able to calm down a lot because I focused on Allison’s heartbeat, but there’s got to be something more than that, right? Please tell me there’s something more, because as much as I want to be around Allison 24/7, I think her crazy hunter dad would probably object.”

Laura can’t hold in her snort of laughter, though it’s really not that funny at all. “Yeah, no,” she says. “But it’s the same general idea. Basically what you need is an anchor to your humanity. Something that reminds you that you’re a _person_ , no matter what shape you happen to be wearing. And the more anchored you are in general, the more, I don’t know, _yourself_ you remain even when you choose to transform.”

“But what sort of thing keeps you anchored?” Laura can practically hear the adorable little frown between Scott’s eyebrows as he speaks. She takes her eyes off the road for a moment to check — and yep, adorable little frown.

“Depends on the person,” she starts, though she knows it’s not a helpful answer. “My anchor has always been my pack, my family. It got...really hard after the fire for a while, because I was new to having the alpha powers and also most of the people who used to anchor me were suddenly gone.”

There’s silence for a bit as Scott digests that. Eventually, he says, “And now it’s just Derek?”

Laura shrugs, and actually lets herself think about the answer for a moment. “No, not really. Like, yes, he’s my main hold on why it’s important that I always come back to myself, but the rest of the family still helps. Thinking about my mom and dad, remembering my cousin Lizzy’s horrible nasal laugh, or my older brother’s stupid glasses and old man sweaters — those things remind me that I’m a person who loves and is loved, that there are things the wolf just can’t understand.”

“What’s Derek’s anchor?”

“You know, that’s a good question.” Laura’s never asked; part of her, she thinks, is afraid of what his answer might be. “I don’t actually know. It could be almost anything, really, as long as it’s strong enough to hold you. My cousin Jack’s anchor was math, the friggin nerd. Whenever he started to lose control, he’d go through a series of equations in his head because, as he told me more than once, _wolves can’t do arithmetic_.”

Scott laughs. “That sounds like an educational little kids’ book.”

“I know! Philip was an illustrator, and he always joked about writing a kids’ book about a werewolf who was bad at math and dedicating it to Jack.” God, she hasn’t thought about that in a long while. It’s good to remember them, to talk about their in-jokes to someone new. In the sunshine, the memories seem somehow less tainted by the pain of loss.

Later in the afternoon, long after she’s dropped him back home, Laura gets a text from Scott that reads: _is it okay for my anchor to be a person? nothing calms me down like thinking about allison._

Laura sighs and stares at the text for too long before she just types out, _Whatever works for you Scotty boy_. At some point, she’s going to have to talk to Scott and Allison both about this. But that’s a problem for Future Laura.

“How do you know Chris Argent?” Derek asks that night as Laura’s crawling into bed beside him. She pauses, blankets held open and one foot still on the floor.

“I...don’t? Not really.”

Derek frowns at her pretty fiercely for such an innocuous answer. “You said you’ve met him. And you know him well enough to trust that he keeps to his code.” There is...a lot of venom in that last statement that Laura does not really feel like unpacking just now. Instead, she sighs and crawls fully into bed, pulling the covers firmly up to her chin before turning to face her brother.

“That’s not so much trust as like, I don’t know, the ability to recognize a fanatic legalist when I meet one.”

“And how did you meet this one?”

And as much as Laura loves to test Derek’s patience, as is her duty as older sister, now is perhaps not the time for it.

“Remember that rogue omega that came through, years ago? You had to be in what, seventh, eighth grade.” Derek frowns harder, but then he nods. “Well, he killed someone about twenty miles north of our territory, and I don’t think that was the first person he killed. So by the time he got here, he already had hunters on his tail.”

Laura remembers tracking the omega’s trail through the forest with Mom, trying to analyze the scent while ignoring the dizzying sickness underneath, the smell of something _wrong_. They’d been tracking the wolf for two days already, and they’d finally found a trail that was only a couple hours old. And suddenly, Laura couldn’t smell the sick omega at all because her lungs were full of _him_.

It had been three years since Laura had crossed paths with her mate in San Diego, and now, somehow, he was _here_. She froze where she was, once again knocked completely off guard by the strength of his scent. Mom noticed, of course, and turned with a frown when she realized Laura had stopped. Before she could ask what was wrong, Laura told her: _hunters_.

They redirected their steps so that they could approach the hunters head-on. Once on their territory, the omega had become the responsibility of the Hale pack, and the hunters were welcome to wait it out on the other side if they didn’t believe the Hales could take care of it. Unfortunately, hunters needed to be constantly reminded of this guideline, and it was best to head them off right away before they got trigger happy at any lupine shadow in the woods. Various hunter codes of ethics don’t mean much once you’ve already been mistaken for an omega and shot.

“Argent was leading the hunting band. Mom and I smelled them in the woods when we were tracking the omega, so we went out to meet them, get them off the territory. I think Mom wanted it to be one of her Alpha Teachable Moments, you know?” Laura smiles at the memory, fond. The Alpha Teachable Moments had been everything from lessons in tracking to reading leadership books to calculating how much food a pack of their size would need depending on the phase of the moon. “How to interact with hunters who are encroaching on your territory, or something like that.”

When they’d reached the hunters, Laura was brought up short by the sight of him, so much closer than the last time she’d seen him. She _hated_ him in that moment. Hated him for being a hunter, hated him for being _here_ , hated him for the threat he represented. Hated him for the gold band on his left ring finger, warm yellow metal pressed against the crossbow in his grip.

There were three other hunters with him, all men and all his age or older. When they spotted Laura and Mom approaching through the trees — took them a good while, Laura remembers noting smugly — two of the strangers shifted their stance to subtly brace themselves and adjusted their grip on their weapons to have them more at the ready. Mom had just smiled at them, indulgent like they were children trying to be intimidating with wooden swords rather than seasoned killers with poison in every weapon.

“It wasn’t a long conversation, really. Mom introduced us both, explained that they were on Hale territory, and that as long as the omega they were tracking was on said territory, it was her responsibility to take care of, and not theirs. One of the hunters tried to argue with her, but Argent shut him down pretty quick. Said he hadn’t noticed when they’d crossed the territory line, and could Mom tell him where it was. Another of the hunters started giving him shit about it, you know, _making himself a wolf’s bitch_ or whatever bullshit disgusting thing they could think of. Argent didn’t really seem to care, just told them to shut up, _my hunt, my rules_. And then he said something in French, but I can’t remember what it was now.”

She’d hated that his voice was beautiful. Hated that he had the decency to have a moral code, but still managed to use it to justify being a murderer. Hated that he was friends with the men who would have murdered her and Mom on sight.

“And he did leave,” Laura concludes, doing her best to shrug while lying on her side. “Took the other hunters with him. He lectured them more about the Code as they left, and he was dead serious about it. What it comes down to is that: a, he wants absolute proof that a werewolf has harmed an innocent, b, they do not harm children or humans, regardless of pack affiliation, and c, they will ostracize any hunter that breaks the Code.”

Laura had been able to hear him reaming out his team for their trigger-happy attitude long after Mom was out of range. She’d caught Mom looking at her, face serious and a little concerned, more than once as she listened to the repeated enumeration of the Code, as well as Argent’s colorful threats should any of his hunters break it. It was almost an hour after they’d parted ways with the hunters that Mom spoke.

_Which one was it?_ She asked, and Laura’s whole heart went cold. _Which one was what?_ Like she didn’t already know, like there was any sort of plausible deniability when Mom had already worked it out. _One of those men was your mate, Laura. I can smell it on you, and you could smell it on him long before I was able to catch the scent._ Laura stayed silent as they walked for a long time, before she finally gave in and told Mom, _Argent_. Mom nodded and said nothing more for a long while.

It was only after they’d caught up to the rogue omega and Mom had dispatched him with prejudice that Mom brought it up again. _You’ve met him before._ Laura shook her head. _I saw him once, that’s all. On a trip to San Diego with Peter._ Mom nodded, but she was frowning. _You never told any of us,_ she said at last, and she sounded almost hurt by Laura’s reticence. _A true mate is something rare, Lo. Something you could embrace. It would make you an incredibly formidable alpha, to have a true mate alliance with the Argent family._ Laura scowled. It wasn’t like that. It could never be like that, and Mom knew it. _It doesn’t matter,_ she told Mom flatly. _I only had to smell the wolfsbane on him once to know it would never happen. I know where my loyalties lie, and it’s not in whatever joke the universe is trying to play on me with this._

Mom had just smiled, a little sad, but mostly proud. _My practical girl_.

“So,” Derek says, once he realizes that storytime with Laura is over. “Legalist fanatic, huh?”

Laura grins. “Oh yeah. Very Javert of him, honestly.” She smiles wider at Derek’s instinctive wince at any reference to _Les Mis_. It’s a lingering aftereffect of the summer Laura listened to the Broadway cast recording for fourteen hours straight on a drive through Nebraska in a car with broken air conditioning. “Wonder if it’s a French thing?”

Derek tries, unsuccessfully, of course, to shove Laura off the bed. She retaliates by lifting her body and dropping the solid weight of her full self entirely on top of Derek, knocking the wind out of him. He makes a couple of grumbly, complain-y sort of noises, and then wraps his arms around her waist, hugging her to him. Laura is forgiven for knowing Argent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know we all love Sheriff Stilinski, and I think his behavior here is in character and I've portrayed it as justifiable within the narrative because it's done on behalf of the protagonists. However, I want to be very clear that this sort of behavior is both a) typical of real life cops and b) _completely fucking unacceptable_. The way that John threatens Argent is an abuse of police power. An off-duty cop showing up in the middle of the night to threaten a campaign of police harassment against someone who hasn't been arrested, let alone charged or convicted, is not an okay way to act.
> 
> I feel like it's important for me to acknowledge this because of the reality of American police, particularly in light of the events of the last year. Our criminal justice system is deeply fucked up, and our law enforcement in particular is rife with corruption and abuse of power. I fully intend to deal with the moral and ethical quandaries brought on by John's profession, and to try to give a complicated issue the thoughtfulness it is due, even if this is literally just fanfiction about werewolves.


	7. chapter five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things that happen in this chapter include: exposition, Family Feels, more exposition, and Pack™.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I rewrote the latter half of this chapter about seventeen times, hence the radio silence for the past several weeks. next chapter may be a bit slow as all, since I'm rewriting 90% of that one to reflect the changes I made to this one.
> 
> chapter-level warnings: description of a POV character's constant low-level anxiety, reference to underrage drinking, references to murder,

God, living with the Hales is going to be the death of Stiles, he swears by all that is good and holy. First of all, Laura keeps feeding Dad bacon like it’s not a big deal, despite the fact that Stiles constantly reminds her that it is, actually, it is a big deal. The last time he tried to explain to her about humans and cholesterol, she’d dismissively informed him that Dad’s heart sounds plenty strong and healthy, and Stiles worries too much. And then she proceeded to steal half of Stiles’s curly fries. He used to be sad that he’d grown up an only child, but Laura’s existence has him seriously reconsidering that stance. The older sister thing makes him want to throttle her, and he doesn’t know how Derek hasn’t done just that yet. 

Also, there’s Derek just being...Derek. He’s stupidly attractive, and it makes Stiles very antsy, largely because he’s not used to finding people who aren’t Lydia Martin attractive. And of course there was the time Stiles went to grab his meds from the bathroom cabinet in the morning before school, and Derek had been in there already standing over the sink with his face in that weird in-between wolfy face that Laura refers to as the beta shift. And he was brushing his fangs. Honest to God, he was _brushing his little werewolf fangs_ , and it was six in the goddamn morning and Stiles just about had a heart attack from the level of cute he was experiencing. Which was, in and of itself, weird, because the dude had _no eyebrows_ when he shifted and was by no logical person’s standards attractive wearing his wolfy face; but Stiles is, as Scott has pointed out on more than one occasion, a freak of nature like that.

There’s also just the matter of _having strangers in his house all the time_. Stiles is learning the thrilling experience of bodily hypervigilance, constantly over-conscious of how many layers he’s wearing and how they fall on his body and whether his jeans emphasize the width of his hips and he _hates_ it. He’s had to move his HRT shit from the bathroom medicine cabinet to the sock drawer of his dresser, because the last time he’d come out to someone was when Scott was worried about how Stiles never changed for gym with everyone else. He’d been worried that Stiles was getting bullied or something — rich, coming from Scott, who’d apparently been Jackson’s favorite target throughout elementary and most of middle school. Scott, because he underreacts to everything, just took it relatively in stride, asked a lot of questions, and then promptly forgot that Stiles was any different from any other guy he knew.

For example, once when Greenburg had bruised his ribs in practice, Scott had reasonably told him that he’d feel better once he took his binder off. Scott hadn’t even noticed he’d said anything weird until Danny had asked what the hell a binder was. Scott, the big doofus, had done the eyes wide, deer-in-the-headlights thing, given Stiles a panicked look, and then said, _it’s...a...really tight...undershirt?_ Which was, technically, true. Everyone shrugged it off, but Stiles will always remember that Scott accepts Stiles’s experiences of manhood to be as universal as his own. He might have cried about it in therapy later.

Anyway, the point is, having Laura and Derek constantly around is hell on Stiles’s ribcage and hell on his dad’s diet, and frankly all around hell on _Stiles’s_ heart health for that matter. And he likes them, he does, but he’s also just. Antsy.

And that’s not even getting into the absolutely balls-to-the-wall insane fact that they’re fucking werewolves.

Yeah, Stiles isn’t getting over that one anytime soon.

So when Stiles comes downstairs on a Sunday morning to find a note from Dad on the fridge explaining that there’d been another “animal attack” last night, and Laura Hale looking at apartments on her laptop at the kitchen table, he’s expecting to feel nothing but overwhelming relief. And he does, really. He’s just also...weirdly disappointed at the idea that she wants to move out. Goddamn werewolves, making him feel things.

Laura grunts a greeting as Stiles makes for the coffee machine. It’s kind of hilarious, how she and Derek are naturally horrible morning people who also cannot function without at least three cups of coffee. Which, granted, werewolves seem to eat about three times as much of everything as a normal human person, but the coffee thing is just hilarious. Like, does caffeine even have a noticeable effect on them?

“Does caffeine even have an effect on you guys?” He may as well ask. Stiles suspects that Laura was being overall sarcastic when she suggested he put together a Werewolves 101, but Stiles has deemed it necessary. Currently, it exists as a series of nested files on his laptop that include: a powerpoint with fun animations, a database that Scott called _terrifying_ the one time he looked at it, pirated PDFs of a bunch of supernatural journal articles, essays, and book chapters, and several word documents of various notes and questions. Also, supernatural academia is totally a thing and Stiles has never been more thrilled.

Laura blinks at him from over her cup of coffee. Judging from what’s still in the pot, she’s on her second cup. “I mean...yes? I don’t know, I’m not exactly sure what caffeine feels like for humans.”

“Well, it’s just that Scott can’t get drunk now,” Stiles says, then stops. Hmmm. Laura’s probably not a snitch, but plausible deniability is an important pillar of all of Stiles’s relationships. “Or so I would imagine. I wouldn’t know for sure, of course, because we are underage and also law-abiding citizens. But overall you guys definitely metabolize shit way faster than the average human. Also, with the amount of coffee you drink, you’re honestly pretty chill.”

“You are a terrible liar, hon,” Laura tells Stiles, undisguisedly amused. “But yes, we do metabolize things much faster. It’s part of why Derek and I would, and I quote you here, eat you out of house and home if left to our own devices, like the ravenous wolves we are.” She raises a single eyebrow at Stiles, which he hates. She and Derek are both horribly talented at expressing all kinds of things with their eyebrows in a way that is equally impressive and intimidating. “It also makes medication adjustments a bitch and a half.”

Oh. Huh. Stiles hadn’t thought of that. “I hadn’t thought of that. Wait, I thought that lycanthropy cures basically everything else because you guys have the most superpowered immune systems in the world. What do you need to take medication for?”

Laura tilts her head at him, one of her oddly canine habits that Stiles will never, ever point out for fear of being eviscerated for like, werewolf racism. “It’s amazing that you’ve survived as long as you have, with tact like that,” she observes. But she sounds amused, so he’s probably not getting eviscerated today.

“Sorry?” he tries anyway.

Laura laughs. “No, you’re not. But points for effort I guess. And, to answer your nosy question, we take meds for the same things humans do. Like, I take pills for a hormone imbalance. My aunt Rosalind took antidepressants. I’ve known wolves with ADHD which, if unmedicated, gets real fuckin' annoying around the full moon, let me tell you.”

Stiles nods, imagining how worked up he’d probably get if he had to contend with moon phases affecting his own ADHD. “So how do you figure out dosages and stuff?” It’s important that he know. For the Werewolves 101.

“Honestly? Guess work and occasionally a witch doctor, if you can find one you trust.”

Stiles can feel his eyes trying to bug out of his head. “Wait, really? Witch doctors? Those are a thing?”

“Most of the supernatural stories you know are _a thing_ , Stiles. Just, you know, different from the stories.”

“Like real werewolves and silver.”

“Like that. Although, that actually has some basis in reality.”

“Ooh, really? Was one of your ancestors like, super allergic to it? Are there different kinds of werewolves and some actually do react to silver?”

Laura laughs at him again. “Not exactly. A lot of the Western European werewolf families originated in Gallic areas. Silver, in French, is—”

“Argent,” Stiles says, cutting her off. He’s suddenly a lot less amused.

“Yep,” Laura agrees. She, at least, seems unbothered, which is kinda nice. Stiles isn’t really good with people; he has a hard time knowing when he’s about to hit a nerve with someone.

“So by witch doctor, you mean…?” Stiles prompts, when the silence gets to be a little much for him. Silence often gets to be a little much for Stiles, but he’s never had a problem filling it when he needs to do so.

Laura grins at the obvious conversational turnaround. “Literally a doctor who is also a witch. Packs usually have someone who fills a role like that, though they’re not always medical doctors.”

“So just like, what, a pack magic user?”

“Sometimes. At the very least, a pack will ally with a druid, and the druid acts as emissary, which is more of a mediator or liaison position than actually part of the pack.”

Stiles frowns. There’s something Laura’s not saying, and he sips at his coffee while he thinks about — and abruptly stops drinking his coffee because, _shit_ , he forgot to doctor it and that is _disgusting_. He knows he’s making a face, because Laura is openly laughing at him while he makes a dive for the fridge.

“Coffee people are monsters,” he grumbles, and Laura just laughs harder. He dumps like half a thing of flavored creamer into his mug and turns back to the topic at hand. “You and Derek don’t have one — an emissary,” he clarifies when Laura blinks her confusion at him. Honestly, and he’s the one with ADHD.

“Not really,” Laura admits with a weird little grimace. “Since it’s just been the two of us for so long...Look, my brother and I, we’re not exactly a traditional pack. We’re barely a pack at all. So no, we don’t have an emissary, or a pack witch. Closest we’ve got is my friend Ward, back in New York. He’s a fairly low-level mage, but he knows enough to help with med adjustments and basic defensive warding.”

Oh. Huh. “I never thought about that, the need for magic defense. I guess it makes a lot of sense, though, if werewolves aren’t the only things out there.”

“Yeah, no,” Laura says with a harsh — dare he think it? — a harsh bark of laughter. “God, I wish our library hadn’t gone up in flames with the house. You’d have had a field day.”

Yeah, Stiles’s fingers itch at just the thought of it. He groans exaggeratedly. “Cruel to tease me with that, Laura,” he accuses. “I literally just discovered that secret supernatural academia is a Thing, and now you mock me with the ghosts of libraries past.”

“I’m awful,” she agrees cheerfully.

“Also, hold on a second — your friend _Ward_? Your friend _Ward_ is the one who does the magical warding in your life. That’s. That’s ridiculous.”

Laura laughs again, and Stiles can’t help but love how bright it sounds in the kitchen. “I know! It’s amazing. The best part is that the idiot boy _named himself_ . He _chose_ the name Ward, and he’d already been doing magic for years at that point. Although, you’ve got no room to talk about naming conventions, _Stiles Stilinski_.”

 _Named himself_ , huh? Stiles files that little tidbit away, wondering if it means what he thinks it might. If maybe he doesn’t have to keep his guard up around Laura and Derek quite so high as he does. He chooses to ignore the dig at his own name, largely because it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. He has, in fact, heard it before from Laura. Several times. “Did he at least do it on purpose?”

“Absolutely not,” Laura assures him with glee. Girl has a serious case of schadenfreude. Stiles admires this about her. “It took him like a solid six months to even notice the coincidence. Derek made a joke about it once, and that was his eureka moment. Should’ve seen the look on his face.” She shakes her head, smiling fondly.

“Derek makes jokes?”

“I have a very sophisticated sense of humor, Stiles,” says...Derek, of course, voice dry and far closer than Stiles had expected. The man himself is leaning against the kitchen doorway, wearing gym shorts and a ridiculously tight muscle tee and absolutely glistening with sweat. It’s horrible. Before he met the Hales, Stiles hadn’t known that people could actually _glisten_ when sweating. He assumed that everyone got blotchy and out of breath and dripped sweat and stank when they exercised. Werewolves are horrible freaks of nature designed to look so good they make everyone in their general vicinity feel bad about themselves.

Also, they are way too sneaky. As evidenced by the fact that Derek is here, clearly back from his run, and Stiles didn’t hear him opening the front door at all despite the hinges that have been rusty and squeaky for years. Horrible, horrible man.

“Make some noise when you walk,” Stiles reprimands him. Of course, Derek does what he normally does when Stiles talks, which is pretend that Stiles never said anything, and shoves gently past him to get at the coffee.

“Drink some water, Der,” Laura tells him absently, and turns her full attention back to her laptop for the first time since Stiles came downstairs. “Caffeine after a run will just dehydrate you.”

Derek rolls his eyes, but he obeys Laura. Whether that’s because she’s his alpha or just that Laura generally talks sense, Stiles doesn’t know. He is still deep in his self-directed field study of the pack dynamics of goddamn werewolves.

“What about before?” he prompts Laura. Stiles refuses to be deterred by the unfairly distracting and oppressive presence of her brother. He refuses. On principle. Laura glances back up at Stiles and does something fairly impressive with her eyebrows that manages to communicate that she doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Stiles sighs. “Your family. Did you have a pack witch, or an emissary? You were definitely a big enough pack.”

There’s a sound from behind Stiles, where Derek is still standing over the sink probably, like air being let out of a car tire. For whatever reason, Derek is way more reluctant to even reference the dead family tragic backstory than Laura is. It’s not really relevant at the moment, though, because Derek never answers Stiles’s questions anyway. That’s why Stiles has Laura.

“A little bit of both,” Laura says slowly, though it takes her a moment to answer. Stiles doesn’t know whether that’s about what he’s asking or her caution of hurting Derek’s delicate sensibilities, but she apparently overrides whichever it is because she continues. “Our older brother, Philip, he was human. And he could do some magic, but not a ton. More of a hedgewitch than anything else, really, but he could do some basic protections and handle mountain ash.” Stiles opens his mouth to ask more about that, because he came across something about using rowan for protection in his research the other day, but Laura raises a hand to stop him. “Alan Deaton was our emissary.”

Okay, yeah, he’s glad she stopped him interrupting, because what? “Alan Deaton? Like, Dr. Deaton, the vet? Scott’s boss, Dr. Deaton?”

Laura grimaces. “That’s the one, yeah.”

“But…” Stiles frowns at Laura, trying to put the pieces together. “The night you got hurt, when you fought Peter. You told my dad _not_ to call Deaton.”

Derek makes an oddly growly sound of derision, which Stiles ignores. Laura, on the other hand, just does a thing with her face that is the visual equivalent of that sound. Siblings are so weird.

“Yeah.”

“But if he was already your family’s emissary, shouldn’t he have been helping you?”

“Well, Stiles,” Laura says, her voice bright and tight and hmm Stiles definitely said the wrong thing somewhere along the line. “You see, my entire family died horribly under Alan Deaton’s watch, so I don’t exactly trust him anywhere within a thousand miles of me when I’m hurt, no.”

Oof. Yeah, okay. That’s fair. “Yeah, that’s fair. Wait, do you think he had something to do with the fire?” That would be super fucked up and also probably something Scott should know, since the man is his _boss_. “Also, does Scott know Deaton’s magic? Is Scott safe over there?”

Laura looks over Stiles’s shoulder, and he follows her line of sight. Ah. She and Derek are doing their eye contact secret code communication thing. It’s a little weird, but when Stiles brought it up to Dad, he’d just shrugged and said that Stiles and Scott basically do the same thing, so. After a moment, Laura pinches her lips in a weird, sour little expression.

“Deaton has no reason to hurt Scott,” she finally says. “He’s a druid, so his first allegiance is to the _balance_ of magic in the world.” Stiles likes how she says _balance_ : like it’s a dirty word, something that tastes foul in her mouth. “I don’t think he helped the woman who killed our family,” she adds, looking once again to Derek for confirmation. “But he certainly never lifted a finger to stop it, nor offered Derek and I any help after. He put some abstract idea of what he believes the world ought to be over the lives of my family. If I ever see him again, he’ll be lucky to get away with all his limbs still attached.”

“Neat,” Stiles says. And he means it. Scott’s boss has always seemed a little creepy to Stiles, and there’s something in the shop that always smells slightly like that night a branch fell on the wire outside his window last summer, sending blue electricity arcing up and down the line until Dad called the power company to have the whole thing shut down. People shouldn’t smell like that, in Stiles’s humble opinion.

Laura studies him for a moment after this statement, then shakes her head with something that Stiles is beginning to suspect is genuine fondness for him, for whatever weird reason. “You’re a freak, Stiles. It’s why I like you.”

Stiles beams at her.

“I quit my job yesterday,” Derek says without preamble one afternoon. He doesn’t even look up from whatever paperback he’s burning through at the moment — it looks like some sort of crime thriller type — so it takes a second for Laura to realize that he’s saying something important. She looks up at him, blinking her confusion over her laptop, where she’s drafting yet another incredibly evasive email to her thesis advisor. Derek doesn’t return the favor, instead absently turns the page before he speaks again.

“And cancelled my rental space at the studio. I’ve got two months to go and collect all my shit, since that’s how far ahead I’ve paid my rent.” From all outward appearances, the bastard is still reading. Laura can see his eyes scanning left to right and down the lines. He turns another page before Laura manages to find her voice.

“Oh,” she says. Yeah, that’s pretty much all she’s got.

Derek looks up at her, finally, and gives a small, sardonic sort of smile at her eloquence. “We’re not going back to New York, Lo,” he says. His voice is...resigned, yes, but not necessarily unhappy? “Scott can’t be left here alone, and whether you meant to or not, you’re building a pack here.”

Laura can’t stop her wince, even though Derek’s tone is free of recrimination. He catches it, of course; she and Derek can read each other’s smallest tics eerily well by now. Comes of living out of each other’s pockets for years upon years.

He rolls his eyes. “It was going to have to happen eventually, Laura,” he tells her, gentle, like she’s the one who might need to be eased into the idea. “It’s — we’re not meant to be all each other has. Two people isn’t enough for a real, stable pack, no matter how hard we’ve been pretending.”

Laura grimaces, because the worst part is that Derek is _right_. “We managed, though, didn’t we?” she asks him, unable to keep the note of pleading from her voice, to keep herself from begging her little brother for reassurance that she didn’t fail him all these years.

Derek does her the honor of pausing, thinking it over before giving an answer. “We’ve managed,” he finally says. “You kept us safe and alive and built us a life. But Laura,” Derek insists, earnest in the way he never is, “You’re _more_ than that here. You’re more, I don’t know, vibrant, you have more energy. You seem happy, in a way you weren’t in New York. And,” he hesitates here, frowning down at his book before turning his gaze back up to meet Laura’s. “And I think maybe I could learn to be happy, too.”

And okay, coming from Derek? That’s fucking _huge_. Therefore, Laura is not in any way to blame for the way she flings herself out of her seat and half-tackles Derek in a hug, nearly knocking him out of his chair. “My _darling,_ ” she coos, squeezing her arms around his shoulders like she’s a boa constrictor rather than a wolf. “My _sweet boy_ ,” she continues as she throws her legs into D’s lap and buries her face in his hair. “Such beautiful _emotional maturity_!”

“What the _fuck_ , Lo!” Derek grumbles, even as he reluctantly returns her hug, shoves his nose into the junction of her neck and shoulder. “Get off me. You’re a nightmare, I changed my mind, I’m going back to New York by myself. When Ward asks where you are I’ll tell him I finally killed you because you’re _awful_.”

Laura, because she is, actually, awful, grabs Derek by the face and smacks a loud, wet kiss against his cheek before hopping off his lap and retreating. Derek makes exaggerated grumbling noises and scrubs at his cheek with his hand, as is his Little Brother Duty, but his ears are pink and he looks a little pleased as he ducks his head back toward his book.

“Also, learn to at least start closing tabs before you lend me your laptop,” Derek says dryly. “Related, I like the apartment on East Main, with the bay window. Lots of natural light.”

“And it’s a third-floor walkup, just like in Brooklyn,” Laura agrees absently, and then Derek’s comment sinks in. “Hold on a second, you _knew_ I was looking at places? You little shit!”

Derek’s only response is to roll his eyes and go conspicuously back to reading. Laura wishes she had something to throw at him for his cheek, but resists the urge to find something suitable because really, she’s pleased. It’s like a huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders. One less thing to worry about.

Laura abandons her email — one more day won’t kill Dr. Joly, and Dr. Joly can’t kill Laura from this distance, probably — and pulls up her bookmarked apartment prospects. She’s pretty sure she can get them into their own place in under two months, one if she’s really lucky. She loves the Stilinskis, but when John offered her a place to crash, he wasn’t signing up to be Pack headquarters. Speaking of which…

“We should ask them to be Pack,” Laura says aloud. Derek looks up from his book, nonplussed, and does that thing with his eyebrows that means, _what the fuck are you talking about, Laura?_ so she clarifies. “The Stilinskis. And Melissa, too.” Derek’s eyebrows get skeptical. He doesn’t say anything. Laura huffs at him, a little annoyed at having to do all the conversational work herself now, since Derek’s apparently used his quota of words for the day. “They act like Pack already,” she points out. “Stiles feeds us and protects Scott in that feral way of his; John protects us — hell, he threatened a hunter for me — and Mel has been a goddamn star about everything. Did you know, she called me, about a week after you got here, and demanded a rundown of werewolf nutritional needs? And Scott says she quizzes him on his senses, especially smells. And also that she’s restocked both their own and the Stilinskis’ med kits to be better prepared for werewolf shenanigans.”

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” Derek remarks mildly. In an uncharacteristic show of restraint, he keeps whatever he’s feeling from his face.

Laura frowns. “I didn’t mean to add Scott,” she says. “And I told you after that I wouldn’t bring someone in without asking you first, and I meant it.

“You’re right. I want to build a larger, more stable pack, and I want to do it here. And yes, I want these three to be a part of that, I really do. But Derek, you get a say. You one hundred percent have veto power over any invitations to be Pack, now and ever after. Hell, if you tell me right now you’d rather go back to New York, that you were just putting on a brave face about Scott and Beacon Hills, I’ll figure it out. I’ll find a nearby pack to take in Scott and we’ll go back to how we were, the moment this shit with Peter is over.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Derek says, cutting in before Laura can ramble herself into a hole. His face is still carefully neutral, but a tension goes out of him that Laura hadn’t even noticed he was carrying. “Despite his complete lack of self-preservation, I like Scott — don’t you dare tell him that, though,” he adds sharply. “It’ll go to his head. Also, he’s a little scared of me, and that’s hilarious.”

Laura grins at him, because yeah, it really is.

“Do you want to offer them the Bite? John, Stiles, and Mel?”

Honestly, Laura hasn’t even thought about that. She gives herself a second, just to double check her gut instinct, then says, decisively, “No. Well,” she amends. “Not right now, at least. I can’t deal with training a bitten wolf on top of everything else, not even mentioning all the associated risks. Maybe, in the future, if one of them asks for the Bite, then we’ll have that conversation. But my intentions for this moment would be just to invite them to be Pack, as they are.”

Derek hums contemplatively. “Three wolves and three humans,” he muses. “It’ll be an odd start to a pack.”

And yeah, Laura doesn’t miss that tense there. “Will it?” she asks, smile creeping over her face without her full permission. “Are you agreeing?”

Derek makes a disgruntled sort of noise. “I mean, I’m not exactly enthusiastic about the idea of having _Stiles_ in my head, but yeah.” A deep breath through his nose and then, entirely serious, “Yes. Make the offer.”

“Garrison Meyers was a fire investigator,” Stilinski says in lieu of a greeting when Laura comes downstairs Tuesday morning. She blinks blearily at him, then shakes her head and makes a beeline for the coffee. Stilinski makes a muffled sort of sound that is almost certainly a laugh at Laura’s expense, but he does wait until she’s clutching a fresh cup of caffeine and downs about half of it immediately. (Advantage to werewolf healing, she’d explained to John early on, when he’d looked on this particular morning habit with awe and horror. Does scald her tongue? Absolutely. But it heals in less than a minute, so it's fine and she is going to continue doing it.)

“Who the hell is Garrison Meyers?” Laura finally croaks at him.

“The dead bus driver.”

“Ah.” John gives her a moment, lets her piece it together on her own. “He’s the one who declared the Hale fire an accident?”

John nods. “Exactly. And there were two other murders the other night — couple of guys who were messing around in the woods, it looks like. One of them ripped apart like Meyers, the other dumped into a trash can fire. Both of them have a history of minor arson in their criminal records.”

Laura sucks in a deep breath. Definitely Peter.

“I’m going to assume they were involved in the fire, too, somehow?”

John shrugs. “That’s my thought. The one who wasn’t burnt alive had a spiral carved into his chest.”

“Fuck.”

“Pretty much.” John sighs and runs a hand over his head in frustration. It gives Laura the briefest sense of deja vu, and then she remembers seeing Stiles make the exact same gesture. “The spiral means I have evidence it’s not random animal attacks, at least, which means I can keep the cases open. But Laura, I need a way to connect Peter to them. I need some kind of proof that he’s faking his injuries somehow.”

Laura nods and drains the rest of her coffee. “I’m working on it,” she assures him. Full moon is on Sunday, and she’s aiming to draw him out by then. “I sent him flowers today, so that’ll rile him up.”

“What?”

“Oh yeah,” Laura says with a grin, because this? This is hilarious. “I ordered flowers to be delivered to him with a note for one of the nurses to read aloud. It just thanks him for sending me Scott. I think I called him a godsend, and a gift to the family.”

“And why would you do that?” Stilinski asks, but he’s smiling a bit.

“Because it’s funny. And also he’ll be furious.” When John just raises his eyebrows like, _clearly that explains nothing, Hale_ , Laura tries to clarify. “An alpha without a pack is weak and unstable. The longer he’s alone, the weaker he gets. Less speed, less strength, slower healing, muted senses. He got a power boost when he became an alpha — and I _still_ haven’t figured out how he managed that, it’s driving me nuts — but by now it’s all wearing off. He bit Scott in an effort to get some of that power back.

“And there’s the stability aspect, too. Without a pack, the draw of the moon is pretty much stronger than any anchor to your humanity you can give yourself. As far as I can tell, Peter’s anchor right now is revenge, and he needs to hold onto that lucidity during his shifts and during the full moon, especially if he wants to actually complete the task he’s set for himself. I’d say that, unless he can somehow build and stabilize a real pack before next month’s full moon, he’ll go full feral.”

“That sounds...less than ideal,” Stilinski says slowly.

Laura can’t help her snort of derisive laughter at that because yeah. Understatement. “No kidding.” She goes to pour herself a second cup, then glares at the coffee pot when she realizes it’s empty. She allows herself the luxury of a muttered string of curses, and then goes about making more while she talks. “If that happens, he’ll be mentally just...gone. There won’t be Peter Hale there anymore, there will only be the wolf. I imagine he’s feeling that kind of wild madness creeping up on him now — desperation is really the only reason to bite a random teenager instead of actively recruiting a pack that wants to be there.”

“So you what, sent him flowers to make fun of him for being bad at doing even that?”

“Essentially, yeah. He’s…” Laura trails off, trying to think of how to explain her uncle. In the early morning quiet, she hears the hissing drip of the coffee maker and the soft shuffling footsteps of Derek making his way downstairs. She doesn’t turn as he comes into the kitchen, just smiles softly as he pads up behind her and buries his face between her shoulder blades.

“Peter’s a prideful asshole,” Derek says, voice muffled in Laura’s sleep tee but still clear.

Stilinski raises his eyebrows, and his mouth does that thing where he’s clearly only maintaining a straight face from long practice. “Is that so?”

“I was going to try to put it more delicately, but yeah,” Laura says. Behind her, Derek makes a skeptical sound.

“You’re not delicate about anything, Lo,” he grumbles. Which, rude. Fair, probably, but rude all the same. “Peter is a smug bastard at the best of times. When he’s playing some sort of elaborate game, which, yeah, this basically is, he’s especially insufferable.” Derek manages to pull himself away from Laura and emerges fully into the waking world, blinking blearily and frowning like he’s offended by the existence of daytime. “Biting and turning a minor on Laura’s territory was a power play as well as something for his own good. It was a way of mocking her for not having control over what’s hers, and probably a way to shove some of the blame off on someone else.”

“Alphas can sometimes use their power to coerce their betas into following their command,” Laura explains. John looks a little sick at this, and Laura definitely doesn’t blame him. “Peter was probably planning to compel Scott into killing with him or even for him — and then letting all the blame fall at Scott’s feet while he sat pretty in his long-term care room.”

“That is supremely unsettling,” John informs them both, voice flat and thin.

“Yeah,” Laura agrees. “It’s one of the reasons I was probably going to end up adopting Scott anyway, even if he hadn’t accidentally switched allegiances by patching me up. He doesn’t deserve to have Peter as his alpha. No one does.”

Derek makes a noise of agreement, and pokes at the coffee maker. He seems satisfied that it’s close enough to being done, because he reaches for a mug in the cabinet above him and pours himself a cup. Stilinski is watching him with that same soft fondness he was directing at Laura earlier, and it makes something inside Laura feel warm and safe. He’s a good man, for a cop.

Laura hands Derek her own mug so he’ll get her a second cup of coffee and turns the topic back to the original concern, which is framing Peter for the murders he’s committed. “So sending him the flowers rubs it in his face that his little pack-building plan backfired. He’s growing weaker by the day, while I’ve stolen his strength and reestablished my claim to the territory. Ideally, this will push him a little bit over the edge, and erode whatever cunning he has left. Peter has plans within plans; if I can get him acting rashly, it’ll be way easier to take him down.”

Stilinski frowns, turning his own mug slowly in his hands. “If this is Hale territory, isn’t it Peter’s as well?”

Derek makes a low snarling sound at that before Laura can speak, though Stilinski, to his credit, barely flinches. Laura herself only barely refrains from making the same sound as her brother, but she learned her lesson the first time she and John had the territory conversation last month. She doesn’t like it when he looks at her like there might be a wild animal beneath her skin. There is, of course, but that’s not the point.

“Not anymore,” Laura says, instead of growling her displeasure. “I was always going to be the Hale pack alpha after Mom, I’ve known that since I was twelve. Peter never really liked that, but he accepted it because he didn’t really have any other choice. So it was technically still his territory while I was in New York, in that it was _my_ territory and he was still part of my pack. When he became an alpha, he left the pack, and therefore lost all claim to the territory.”

“He won’t see it that way,” Derek says darkly.

“Yeah, I imagine that’s why he lured me 3,000 miles from my life and tried to kill me, D,” Laura reminds him. “Legitimize his claim and all.”

Stilinski is starting to look a bit overwhelmed, something that happens whenever they talk too much werewolf stuff at once. Laura doesn’t really blame him; all in all, he’s been taking the whole thing remarkably well. She knows he probably has more questions with every answer that she gives him, but this is all enough for now.

“Let me handle the next few stages of dealing with Peter,” she tells him gently. “You look dead on your feet. Why don’t you go take your morning nap or whatever the hell it is you do after a night shift, yeah?”

Stilinski rolls his eyes at her, but he relents when his jaw involuntarily opens in a huge yawn. Laura can’t help but grin at him.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Hale,” he grumbles good-naturedly as he shuffles past her. “You kids going running with Scott today?”

“Yep,” Laura says, and drains the last of her second cup. “Stiles, too, if he ever _gets his ass out of bed_.” This last is over-loud in the kitchen, almost shouted upstairs. Sure enough, there’s a satisfying crashing sound as Stiles likely flails out of bed in his surprise. John heaves a deep sigh and shakes his head, but he’s smiling. As he turns to go, Laura remembers her conversation with Derek yesterday, and reaches out to gently grip John’s shoulder and stop him from disappearing just yet. He looks back at her, curious.

“Almost forgot,” she says, dropping her arm and shoving both hands into the pockets of her sleep pants. “You and Stiles both home tonight?”

John frowns a little, thoughtful. He doesn’t quite scrunch up his nose the way his son does, but it’s a near thing. “Yeah, should be. Why?”

“Invite Melissa over for dinner. There’s something I want to talk to the three of you about. Nothing bad!” she adds hurriedly when John’s eyebrows shoot up in alarm. “Just want to get ahead of the werewolf shit for once and talk to my three favorite humans about some stuff before it all just _happens_ anyway, as seems to be the trend lately.”

The Sheriff smiles crookedly at that and nods. “I’ll call Mel after my morning nap. Have fun on your run, kids.” He directs this last over Laura’s shoulder toward Derek before finally shuffling his way toward the stairs.

Laura nudges Derek’s shoulder with her own. “I’m gonna go change, kiddo. You wanna run with Scott or Stiles today?” It’s necessary, a lot of the time, to split up one or two miles into the run. Stiles is in pretty good shape for a sixteen-year-old lacrosse player that never actually gets any game time, but he is still human, and slower than the rest of them. Scott especially likes to put on speed once he gets going on these morning runs, stretching the limits of his more resilient body, glorying in the fact that he no longer has to worry about triggering an asthma attack if he goes slightly overboard or pushes himself a hair too hard. And Laura definitely can’t begrudge him that, but it’d be wrong to leave Stiles behind. Even on the days when it would serve the little shit right, she thinks a little darkly. He frankly deserved it today, even. He’d used all the hot water in the shower last night, meaning Laura had about one minute of warmth before the water went icy cold.

Derek shrugs. “I’ll take Scott,” he says after a moment’s consideration. “He’s quieter.”

Laura chuckles a bit at that. It’s hilarious to her, the way that Stiles just pisses Derek off, mostly without even meaning to. They have _clashing personalities_ , as Aunt Rosalind would have said. Stiles is snarky, distractible, and kind of an overall insensitive asshole, who’s often too smart for his own good. He gets under Derek’s skin in a way that is highly entertaining for Laura to watch, and one of these days she’s going to orchestrate trapping them together in an escape room or some shit while she and Scott look on and eat popcorn.

Stiles gave Laura a pretty extensive lecture about her responsibilities as far as hosting dinner parties in houses that don’t belong to her over the course of their morning run, but he seems willing to forgive her when he and Scott come home that evening after lacrosse practice to the smell of chili permeating the entire house. They clatter into the kitchen like the herd of elephants they are, and Scott looks about ready to start drooling.

“It’s turkey chili,” Derek says gruffly when Stiles opens his mouth. He looks ridiculous — Derek, that is; Stiles is always ridiculous — decked out in an apron he’s pulled out of god-knows-where, wooden spoon in hand and arms crossed defensively against Stiles’s predictable verbal assault on the theme of his father’s health. Derek’s eyebrows are so deeply furrowed that they’re almost merging, and it takes everything in Laura not to laugh at him.

Stiles snaps his mouth shut, then opens it again to say, “I was just gonna ask where the hell you got a second crock pot from, because I know for a fact we only have the one.”

Some of the tension leaves Derek’s shoulders, and he shrugs dismissively before returning to the task at hand. At the moment, it’s cornbread. “Well now there’s two. Werewolves eat a lot. Both of you go shower, you stink.”

Scott rolls his eyes and tromps upstairs without ever saying a word, and Stiles, surprisingly, only pauses to narrow his eyes at Derek before following suit.

“You really want to make that kid Pack?” Derek murmurs to Laura in long-suffering tones. Laura just laughs and ruffles his hair on her way out of the kitchen.

The Sheriff comes home with Melissa in tow about an hour later, just as the cornbread is finishing up and Scott and Stiles have made the executive decision to ignore their homework in favor of video games. John puts an end to that real quick, and things progress pretty quickly from there.

One of the things Laura loves about this weird little makeshift family is the seemingly universal agreement that serious business waits until after food has been consumed. The chili disappears astoundingly fast for such a small group, even accounting for the lycanthropy of half of them; Derek is quietly pleased about it. When Stiles and Scott finish scraping their bowls, Derek looks at Laura and nods.

“Right,” Laura says, drawing herself upright in her chair and taking a deep breath. The table stills and all eyes turn toward her — they already all treat her as an alpha, she realizes, and something deep inside her breathes a sigh of relief. “I’m sure you’re all wondering why it is that I’ve called you together this evening.”

“Laura,” Scott groans, prompting laughter from Stiles and Mel.

“Hush, pup,” she admonishes fondly, but she does go straight to the point. “I want to make all of you Pack.”

Scott looks from Laura to Derek and back to Laura, and then full-on _beams_ at her. He’s adorable, Jesus Christ. John and Mel look at each other first, do some sort of subtle eyebrow exchange, and then turn back to Laura almost in unison.

John says, “Explain.”

Okay, so perhaps that was too straight to the point. Right. Backing up, then. “Derek and I are going to be staying in Beacon Hills on a more permanent basis. Don’t worry,” she reassures John. “I’m sending out inquiries about apartments in town while I get the shit with the County sorted for the house. But Beacon Hills, this place is our home, and more than that it’s our territory. We belong here, and we’ve been away long enough. Too long, maybe. Besides, I’m not about to leave our Scotty boy here on his own. I wanna keep him.” Scott answers this statement with a grin. “So after we take care of Peter, we’re going to go to New York, get our stuff, and move back here to stay.

“And if we’re settling, we want to build a pack, a real pack. Scott and Stiles have already heard me talk about this in bits and pieces, but werewolves are social creatures, we’re meant to thrive in large, close-knit groups. Our family was thirteen people in one house, and that's honestly pretty small. And me and Derek — it hasn’t exactly been easy, just the two of us for so long. Frankly, I don’t think I realized how unbalanced I was with just Derek here until I accidentally picked up Scott.” Laura pauses here to offer Scott a small, grateful smile, because she really does owe him. He blushes and ducks his head, confused and embarrassed and pleased. “Before we came back here, only one human in six years has known what me and Derek are: our friend Ward, who is a witch, and who figured it out on his own. We’ve been friends with him for almost three years now, and I love the kid, but — but he has never felt like Pack. Not the way you all do.

“Pack is family, and it’s also more than that. And here’s the thing: all of you _already act like Pack_. John, you took one look at me sleeping in my car and gave me a place to stay, and then you opened your home to Derek, too, no hesitation. You all took care of me when I was hurt, even though you were confused and scared. There aren’t words for how much that means to me. But this is me trying. Please, be Pack?”

“I’m in,” Stiles says, breathless, the moment Laura stops talking. “I mean, you know that, right? Scott’s my brother, I was already planning on worming my way into your wolfy little hearts and making myself part of your pack regardless, this just shaved like six months off my long-term plan.”

Laura laughs at that, a surprised, joyful little thing, while Derek just groans and rolls his eyes, muttering, “Of course.” John and Melissa, meanwhile, are looking at each other again, their silent communication expressing...alarm?

“I don’t...no offense, Laura, Derek,” Melissa says, voice pitched with nerves. “I don’t really want to be a werewolf.” John makes a noise of agreement.

Ah, so that’s the source of the alarm. “You don’t have to be,” Laura assures her hurriedly. “If you, or Stiles, or John wants the Bite somewhere down the line, then we can have that conversation. But I’m not offering that right now.”

“Then — okay, I’m not sure what you _are_ offering?” Mel says. “What does it mean to be a human in a wolf pack?”

Stiles is almost bouncing in his seat with excitement because he knows the answer. Laura knows he knows, because he followed her around one afternoon a couple weeks ago peppering her with questions about this very same topic. She wonders, now, if that was part of the long-term plan he mentioned.

Laura sighs, unwillingly fond. “Go ahead, Stiles,” she tells him indulgently. “Share your knowledge with the class.”

“Honestly? It’s a little bit, _it means what you want it to mean_. I know, I know, lemme finish,” he adds hastily when Melissa opens her mouth. She does something judgmental with her eyebrows that Laura really likes, though Stiles must be immune to it from common use, because he takes no notice. “It’s all the stuff Laura already said about family, and it’s like a promise to protect and support one another, blah blah sentiment.” He gives a dismissive little wave of his hand, shoving aside all the emotional bits of what Pack means in favor of going on to the part he clearly thinks is the cool bit. “But humans in a pack also become part of the pack bond, which is the thing Scott’s complaining about when he says he has Derek and Laura in his head and can feel Derek sulking from across town.”

Scott looks at Stiles in naked alarm, then over at Derek, who’s glowering at both of them something fierce. Underneath his glare, though, Laura can sense his amusement; and after a moment, Scott seems to feel it, too, because he relaxes and turns back to Stiles. Who has, of course, noted none of this exchange.

“It’s a metaphysical connection to each other, but mostly to the pack alpha — here, our fearless leader,” he adds, nodding to Laura. “I’m not gonna be able to give you first-hand information about what that feels like, not like Scott can, but it’s like an awareness of others in the back of your mind. You get a general sense of how far away they are, if they’re physically okay, sometimes a sense of their feelings, if they’re strong enough. And! In stronger packs with more powerful alphas, humans get some of the perks of wolfiness, like slightly heightened sense and faster healing. Which is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, _super freaking cool_.

“So yeah, that’s basically what Laura’s asking, I guess. Offering. That’s what it means.” Stiles pauses, frowns, and then adds, “Also, I think it means you stop threatening me with a baseball bat when I come through Scott’s window.”

“Son,” John sighs, long-suffering.

“Maybe being Pack means you don’t climb through my son’s window in the middle of the goddamn night, Stiles,” Mel offers wryly.

“Maybe being Pack means you finally give him a house key?” Scott offers, ever-hopeful.

“No,” Melissa and John say simultaneously. Scott slumps a little, a performative pout, but Stiles is already looking at Laura with the kind of single-minded focus she rarely sees from him.

“What do I need to do?”

“Son, I think we should maybe talk about this first —” John starts, but Stiles, surprisingly, cuts him off.

“No. Dad, you can’t talk me out of this. I’m in it, I was always going to be. From the moment I dragged Scott out of bed into the woods on a school night to look at a gross pile of animal guts.” He shoots a glance at Scott, who gives him an encouraging smile. “It’s _Scott_. We come as a pair. If one of us is involved in weird or stupid shit, we both are, and you know it. I’ve been attached to this kid’s hip since we were eleven years old, I’m not gonna stop now just because things got a little... _hairy_.”

Mel, Scott, and Derek all heave exaggerated groans at the stupid pun, but John’s not smiling. 

“So? Laura?” Stiles prompts.

“Pack bonds follow blood,” Laura begins. “The Hale Pack was family, either direct relations or married in. Scott’s bonding to me and Derek was possible because he had no strong ties to Peter, the alpha that bit him, and because I was bleeding out everywhere. I — this isn’t exactly something to go sharing about, okay — if you’re not born and raised to inherit it like I was, you can become an alpha by killing one. Which is how Peter must have gotten his power, though I still cannot figure out how the hell he managed that one. So, for Scott to see an injured and defenseless alpha that wasn’t his own and to choose to help instead of grab for power — that kindness, that loyalty, added to the fact that I got my blood all over him, was enough to transfer the bond of Pack.

“So Mel, because you’re Scott’s blood, all you really have to do is tell me you want to be Pack and it’s easy from there. For you, Stiles and John, since you’re humans not raised by wolves, if you will, or related to Pack, it might be more complicated.”

“Scott and I are blood brothers, does that count?” Stiles asks.

Scott turns to Laura, nodding eagerly, while his mother mouths the phrase _blood brothers_ at John with a mix of curiosity and resignation, an expression that is quickly becoming familiar to Laura.

“What, exactly, does that mean, son?” John asks on a sigh.

Stiles shrugs. “You know, blood brothers. When we were, what, eleven? twelve?” He looks to Scott for confirmation and gets a shrug of Scott's own in return. “Whatever. We cut our hands and put them together and made a vow to be brothers forever. Like you do.”

John and Melissa sigh in unison, a sound that is so expressive of mutual fondness and exasperation that Laura has to bite back a smile. “Of course,” John says. “Of course you did.”

“Actually, that should work then,” Laura says slowly, looking to Derek. He nods, looking thoughtful. “Alright. Then all of us are connected through blood.

“Honestly, from there, it’s less about the words you say and more about how you mean them, and how much. Magic recognizes intent; it’s shaped more by will than by anything else. So if you tell me that you’ll be Pack, and you mean it — mean it in the way that you’ll come when a packmate calls, no matter the hour; that you’ll defend and protect and care about your pack; that you’ll put pack before everything else; and that you’ll trust all of us to do the same for you — say it, and mean it, and it’s done.”

Stiles’s eyes are bright, but his face is serious, jaw tight and determined when he answers, “For better or for worse, Hale. You’re stuck with me now.”

Laura feels the bond flare to life between them, Stiles a bright spark of energy in her periphery. She can feel the geometry of the pack bonds rearranging, making room and settling; can see it in Derek’s posture as he feels the change, on Scott’s smiling face.

Melissa’s been watching her son closely throughout, and her mouth thins as she comes to a sudden decision. Turning to Laura, she says, voice firm, “Me, too.”

And, damn, does the woman mean it, because that’s all it takes. Laura’s honestly a little blindsided by how quickly the pack bonds shift to accommodate and welcome her. Note to self, Laura thinks a little dizzily, Melissa McCall does not fuck around. Woman has a strength of will like _iron_.

Still, John says nothing. He’s watching all of them, tense and worried and looking, Laura thinks, very small and alone, surrounded by his family at his own kitchen table. She knew he would be the one who needed the most time to think it over; she’s sure there are conversations about the supernatural and the law with John in her future as he tries to work out what he wants his role to be. But Laura never really thought the decision would _hurt_ him like it seems to do.

“You don’t have to decide now, John,” she says, gentle and without judgment. “It’s an open offer. And if the answer’s no, that doesn’t change much anyway — you’ll always have a place with me, with all of us. But don’t try to talk yourself into or out of it, ‘kay? Magic doesn’t take well to uncertainty. The bond won’t stick.”

He nods, and the table seems to let go a collective breath. Stiles decides that this means the conversation is over for now, and pushes away from the table to start grabbing dishes. Scott and Derek both get up to help, jostling each other for plates with an ease that warms Laura’s pack-starved little heart. The kitchen begins to fill with noise, and Laura closes her eyes to allow herself a moment to bask in it all: the sound of the water running in the sink, the clank of the dishwasher being loaded, the muttered argument about the _correct_ way to load the dishwasher, Melissa’s muffled laugh.

Then John says, “Wait a second, _magic_? There’s _magic_ now?” and Laura’s eyes snap open.

“Dad,” Stiles says, turning from the sink with comical slowness. “What the _hell_ did you think werewolves were?”

Laura gets a call around ten o’clock on Friday night from a panicked staffer at Peter’s facility. She doesn’t know how it happened, the girl insists in terrified tones. She was just doing her evening rounds, and when she got to Peter’s room, he was _gone_ . It doesn’t make any _sense_ , she tells Laura, and the poor thing is definitely way more broken up about it than Laura will ever be, probably. His chair was still in the room, and there’s no record of anyone other than staff and residents being in that hall tonight. She’s already called the police, she reassures Laura about five times, but she wanted to make sure Laura knew what was happening, and she promises to call the minute she knows anything else.

Laura spares a moment to give the staffer some soothing words and help her calm down a bit, but she can’t keep from grinning. Stiles told her yesterday that Laura delights in schadenfreude more than anyone else he’s ever met, and he’s probably not wrong. She’s decided he probably meant it as a compliment, the awful little weirdo.

“Hey Derek,” she calls to where her brother is sprawled in front of the tv in the den. She doesn’t know why he bothers with the television at all, given that the game show it currently displays is muted and he’s got his nose buried in a book, but whatever. He looks up at her, blinking a couple times as if to reorient himself in the real world rather than in whatever fantasy one he’s living in these days. (If it’s _Lord of the Rings_ , _again_ , Laura will beat his skull in with the damn paperback.) “Guess who pulled a jailbreak tonight?”

It takes him a second, but then Derek grins, wide and slow and _sharp_. In seconds, he’s flung down his book and is grabbing his shoes from by the door. Laura joins him, grabbing her leather jacket and the keys to the Camaro. She opens the door and turns back to her brother with a scary wolf grin of her own. “How do you feel about a little family reunion?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> transgender vocab notes: I've alluded to it before now, but this chapter dealt with it directly — Stiles is transgender! he is assigned female at birth (afab) or, to use a term that has largely fallen out of vogue, female-to-male (ftm). he wears a binder, which is a constricting undershirt used to flatten the breasts and give someone a more masculine silhouette. binding properly is super important, because improper binding (like with an ace bandage or duct tape) can seriously damage your ribcage, lungs, and even spine. even proper binding (with a garment made for the specific purpose in the correct size) has adverse effects if you wear it too long or while sleeping or exercising, hence Stiles's complaints about his ribcage aching. Stiles also does hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, which in his case means taking testosterone, or T. this has all the same effects as an influx of testosterone in a cisgender teen boy: deepening voice, getting hairier, acne, the whole nine yards. all this good stuff will come up occasionally throughout this story, since it's a part of Stiles's life and character. if you have any questions, leave them in the comments!
> 
> some housekeeping notes: next chapter will be the last full chapter, so prepare for some action-packed werewolf shenanigans and earning that graphic depictions of violence warning! after that will be an epilogue to this installment, wrapping us up for a bit. between this and the second major installment, I hope to post two little interlude one-shots. one will be Laura and Derek in New York, and the other deals with the aftermath of the s1 finale in beacon hills. cheers!


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